In the late 2000s, the third wave of emo wrapped up. Some suggest this transition from the third wave to the fourth wave of emo occurred around 2008 and 2009. As the third wave saw the genre explode into the commercial mainstream, the fourth wave took steps back. These bands blended elements of second-wave emo and pop-punk to create a wave reminiscent of, and influenced by, the 1990s. As some defining fourth-wave emo bands remain together and touring today, that’s not the case for all. These are the three fourth-wave emo bands that we’re hoping will reunite in 2027.
Title Fight
One of the main groups that bridged the gap between the third wave and fourth wave in Title Fight. Their 2009 EP, The Last Thing You Forget, presented a new direction for emo going into the 2010s. They brilliantly followed up with their debut album, Shed, released in 2011. At this point, the band had distanced themselves from their pop-punk on their EP, and they delivered a fresh new sound to emo. They continued this with Floral Green in 2012, which added elements of shoegaze to their sound. With Hyperview in 2015, the band fully embraced this shoegaze direction, pushing emo into new terrain.
Title Fight became the template group for many bands that emerged during the fourth wave of emo. Though the band never officially broke up or announced a hiatus, they’ve been inactive since 2018. Ned Russin, the band’s vocalist and bass player, has been focused on his band Glitterer. His brother, drummer Ben Russin, joined Citizen, another pioneering fourth-wave band. Guitarist Jamie Rhoden has been focused on personal endeavors, stepping away from major touring while their other guitarist, Shane Moran, joined the band Turnover. They did briefly reunite at Ben Russin’s wedding in July 2026, though no formal reunion has been set.
Modern Baseball
This defining fourth-wave emo band out of Philadelphia was only active for about six years. During this time, they released three defining fourth-wave emo albums. Their debut, Sports, is among the most influential emo albums released in the 2010s. They followed up with You’re Gonna Miss It All in 2014, a title that describes the short-lived band to a T. Their final album, Holy Ghost, was released in 2016.
Modern Baseball went on an indefinite hiatus on 2017 due to mental health issues, burnout from extensive touring and an attempt to preserve their personal friendships among members. They’ve also never announce an official breakup, the band has been inactive since 2017. Members have started other projects such as Slaughter Beach and Dog.
The Brave Little Abacus
One of the earliest bands to contribute to the fourth wave of emo formed in Sandown, New Hampshire. The Brave Little Abacus blended elements of math rock into their brand of emo. Formed in 2007, they self-released two studio albums and split up following the release of their 2012 EP, Okumay.
Members went on to form the power pop band Me In Capris, while keyboardist Zack Kelly-Onett became a modern classical musician. Their drummer, Adam Demirjian, has been active in Me In Capris and in the power pop band Lilith, based in Boston. They’re considered one of the most underrated fourth-wave emo bands, and their return would solidify their place among the emo revivalists of the era.
The top election official in Los Angeles County has done a preliminary review of the Trump DOJ’s purported list of alleged noncitizen voters and found it to be … shoddy. Surprising absolutely no one.
Out of DOJ’s list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters in California, more than 7,000 had Los Angeles County addresses. Dean C. Logan’s office took a sample of 200 of those L.A. voters and found that 1/4 may have been born in the United States, nearly 1/2 were cancelled or inactive voters, and nearly 3/4 had never voted, according to a new court filing:
It’s critically important to frame this properly: Election administrators must always balance making sure ineligible voters don’t vote with assuring that eligible voters aren’t wrongfully denied their right to vote. Make voting rules and regulations too strict and the risk goes up of excluding legitimate voters and not counting their votes.
It’s a balance that Trump and Republicans refuse to strike in their jihad to vilify noncitizen voters and elevate a vanishingly small problem into a reason to distrust election results. It’s telling that they voice more apparent concern about what they call “vote dilution” by noncitizen voting than they do about outright denying U.S. citizens the right to vote and have their vote counted.
In the California case, the shoddy list makes even more stark the incredible demand the Trump administration is suing to impose on the state. It wants California — with voting already underway — to introduce new additional steps into the vote tabulation process: review DOJ’s crap list, segregate all the ballots cast by people on that list, and run a real-time review to confirm whether those voters are citizens. Then — and only then — can California count those ballots.
Note on whom the burden falls here: The Trump administration can supply a flawed and unreliable list, then California — while already conducting a live election — has to run around and jump through the extra hoops that the administration has created for it.
Here’s how a top Los Angeles County election official put it in her own declaration in the case:
Because the County results must be submitted by December 3, 2026, and certified by the State by December 11, 2026, ballots held pending an open-ended federal review may, in practical effect, never be counted. This process would risk disenfranchising voters who are validly registered. The process the DOJ seeks to have the Registrar undertake jeopardizes that core right for potentially thousands of voters, not to mention the finalization of election results, confidence in election results, and the ability to allow new elected officials to be instated in their positions.
I should mention that the administration has offered to “help” California and work together in cooperative fashion to vet the administration’s crappy list, but it’s too precious an offer to need its own debunking:
“We’re not perfect and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said in a Monday press conference, anticipating exactly what happened yesterday. “These are the ones where we’re kind of the most confident that they are noncitizens.”
“Kind of the most confident.”
You get it.
Dems Sue Trump for Election Interference
Various Democratic entities filed a new federal lawsuit in D.C. to try to block the worst of President Trump’s attacks on the midterm elections, including his demands to purge voter rolls and not count ballots, his threats against election officials, and his interference in state-run elections:
The Corruption: $50M Woman Edition
Where to even start with this?
The recently remarried Alina Habba, who now goes by Alina Mildon, landed a guaranteed $50 million deal to serve as general counsel of a brand new corporate entity tied to Venezuelan billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini, the NYT reports. Among the lowlights:
The company — Concord Partners, LLC — was formed in Florida on Oct. 22, 2025 by Isabela Herrera, 27, the billionaire’s daughter and a U.S citizen.
The deal was for $10 million a year for four years, plus bonuses, bringing the total guaranteed compensation to $50 million.
Mildon “finalized the deal” while she was still the acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
Mildon’s start date was Jan. 1, 2026. By then, Mildon was a senior adviser to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the role she took after being disqualified as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
President Trump pardoned Julio Herrera Velutini on Jan. 15, 2026.
Mildon denies having any role in the pardon.
The timing of this revelation may be connected to the epic ongoing feud between Mildon and Ric Grenell that has produced a sleazefest of competing allegations of off-the-charts corruption.
Russia’s Failed Attack on Germany
This still hasn’t broken through in the U.S., but over the summer, Russia intelligence launched a drone attack on a cargo plane carrying military assistance to Ukraine while it was parked at an airport in eastern Germany. It was the most dramatic of Putin’s provocations against NATO countries which have been on an uptick since that failed attack.
The attack was part of a broader effort to position agents, explosives and weapons across Europe to strike targets supporting Ukraine and sow chaos that could strengthen political opposition to military aid for Kyiv, according to investigators and intelligence officials.
Investigators have uncovered networks smuggling explosives, drones and weapons into the EU, along with safe houses and concealed underground caches near airports, arms manufacturers and other potential targets.
There’s been a lot of chatter lately about whether World War III is already underway. I think that’s overdetermined, but it’s also true that we probably won’t notice until we’re deep into it.
‘Mongoloid Moron’
The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg writes about being targeted by President Trump as a “Mongoloid Moron” in the Oval Office yesterday — an outburst that the White House happily touted on social media.
Who Gets to Define We the People?
Jamelle Bouie: “[T]he drive to denaturalize Omar is, by itself, a startling attack on the liberty of all Americans. It’s a move that harks back to the worst of the nation’s past — those moments when the government sought to shape, define and ultimately choose who would be ‘the people’ of the United States.”
The Most Rancid Racism
In the racist rants of President Trump and his enablers, Somali Americans are both primitives who eat your pets and ingrates who are undeservedly “living the high life” at your expense:
Stephen Miller claims Somali-Americans in Minnesota are "buying Mercedes, buying BMWs, they buy a nice house, all their kids fly first class all over the world"(This is a lie!)
The Trump DOJ — corruptly deployed by the White House as an unprecedented election interference tool — sure is getting the headlines it wants from its campaign to prosecute alleged noncitizen voting while the midterm elections are already underway:
NYT: Justice Dept. Charges 28 in California With Voting-Related Crimes
AP: Justice Department arrests more than 2 dozen in California sweep targeting alleged noncitizen voters
NPR: DOJ charges 28 in California with voting crimes as election tensions escalate
Even though those stories include the usual caveats — about the rarity of noncitizen voting, Trump’s track record of inflating the risks thereof, and the administration’s disinformation campaign targeting the election — the top-line news remains arrests and prosecutions.
DOJ says it has charged 113 people in 20 states with illegal voting and illegal registration offenses over the last seven weeks.
The timing is no accident, of course.
Rolling out alleged noncitizen voting prosecutions right before the election instills fear in Black and brown communities, may dampen voter turnout, provides a ready-made excuse for GOP losses, serves as a pretext for challenging/delegitimizing the election results, and generally is a brazen display of ratfuckery.
The DOJ has not been discreet or muted in its approach. It has issued press releases touting its noncitizen voting prosecutions that contain photos of the defendants (albeit with their faces digitally obscured). Yesterday, acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter held a press conference in California — where mail-in voting is already underway — to announce the 28 new prosecutions there, which DOJ has dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote.”
The arrests weren’t low-key either. The wife of a 72-year-old man from Belize said federal agents showed up at their house before dawn in full tactical gear with guns drawn — along with camera crews and news helicopters. He later appeared in court still in his pajamas. He is reportedly a registered Republican.
The timing is especially glaring because some of the new alleged noncitizen voting cases go back years, to 2020 and earlier. A couple of the new California cases allege fraudulent voter registration as far back as 2002 and 2003. Some of the cases don’t even allege illegal voting per se, but rather making false statements on naturalization paperwork. One lawful permanent resident charged in North Carolina has been in the United States for so long that DOJ identifies her as a “national of former Yugoslavia.”
Why The Timing Is Extra Pernicious
But the timing isn’t accidental for another reason: Bringing these cases so late in the cycle leaves no time to test these allegations in court before the election. If the cases later fall apart, if they’re dismissed, if they result in acquittals, then … too bad, so sad.
The attempted prosecutions will have served their election disinformation purposes, and there’s no way to roll back the clock and undo the damage.
There are already early signs that some of the new prosecutions in California are flimsy. Some of the newly charged immigrants said they had no memory of ever registering to vote, the LA Times reported:
At the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles late Monday, several green card holders arrested in a crackdown on alleged California voter fraud expressed confusion over the charges — with some saying they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.
Among them was Ana Domínguez, 60, a native of El Salvador living in Long Beach as a lawful permanent resident. Federal authorities accused her Monday of fraudulently registering to vote in July 2006 and then lying about it in her naturalization paperwork in March 2026.
Domínguez said she did not have any memory of registering to vote.
Another man accused of the same crimes as Domínguez said the same: He wasn’t aware of ever registering to vote, as federal prosecutors claimed he had.
It’s not uncommon for noncitizens to end up being unknowingly registered to vote during previous interactions with the government. “There is only a crime if the government can prove willful violations of federal law,” election law expert Rich Hasen noted.
DOJ’s One-Two California Punch
The new round of criminal cases is happening in parallel with the Trump DOJ’s lawsuit against California trying to force it to segregate and not count alleged noncitizen mail-in ballots — again, while voting is already happening.
The administration continues to try to ratchet up pressure on California election officials. In a letter Friday, the DOJ reportedly warned that state election officials who knowingly process ballots cast by noncitizen voters are at risk of investigation.
In a striking admission, acting DAG McCotter, the DOJ’s No. 2, conceded yesterday that the list of some 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters that the administration is demanding California use to segregate ballots may contain some citizens:
WOW. Trump’s #2 at DOJ just admitted this:“There may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens. We’re not perfect.”
Ultimately, the most pernicious aspect of this campaign against the phantom scourge of noncitizen voting is the risk that the administration’s sloppiness, indifference, and aggressiveness results in legally cast ballots from U.S. citizens not being counted.
In a 180-degree turn, the Justice Department has gone from its historic role of protecting and defending the individual right to vote to being the leading threat to free and fair elections.
Why California?
I remain puzzled why so much of the Trump administration’s election-interference and disinformation campaign is focused on California. The electoral math doesn’t add up. Thoughts?
A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.
The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.
This scheme appears to have never gotten off the ground.
Just In …
WaPo: A small group of about 10 current and former U.S. national security officials with DoD experience has been discreetly advising state governments and members of Congress on how to prepare for the possibility that the Trump administration will attempt to interfere in November’s midterm elections.
Quote of the Day
“Our number one risk at this point is the federal government.”—Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) on the biggest threat to free and fair elections
Pure Unadulterated Racism
Trump: "You go up to Minnesota — number one place in the entire country for the sale of Mercedes-Benz. And Somalians are buying them. They come here with low IQs and no money and they get rich. Do we feel stupid? Our fraud division is getting them all."
Over the past week, the East Potomac Park case has morphed from another of President Trump’s personalist projects in D.C. to a burgeoning confrontation between the executive and judicial branches.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes had, by her own admission, bent over backwards to accommodate the Trump administration as it defended its supposedly nascent plan to remake a popular park in the heart of monumental D.C.
But then — in violation of her orders that the administration provide advanced notice and a chance for the court to intervene before undertaking any major projects in the park — the National Park Service removed hundreds of trees from the park’s golf course after providing scant notice just before 5:00 p.m. ET on a Friday before a holiday weekend.
That led to a fiery hearing in front of Reyes on Columbus Day in which she deplored the conduct of the administration and its DOJ attorneys. The hearing culminated with Reyes temporarily blocking any more tree removals at the park.
In the kind of self-defeating move that’s become common in cases where Trump has taken a close personal interest, the Trump DOJ responded to the courtroom woodshedding with a defiant motion on Friday evening calling on Judge Reyes to step aside from the case.
The motion to disqualify was over the top, accusing her of “histrionics,” “bias,” “disdain,” “open hostility,” and “animosity” toward the Trump administration in this and other cases.
The motion was signed by a single attorney: Stanley E. Woodward, Jr., the No. 3 official at DOJ.
Judge Reyes last night denied the motion to disqualify herself but not before eviscerating the Justice Department again: “That is a serious charge. The Court answers it. With the record.”
With that prelude, Judge Reyes spooled out pages of transcripts from prior proceedings in the case that rebutted the administration’s claims against her, before concluding:
It is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion. But it is much harder to meet the demanding legal standard against a full record. By any objective measure, the Government fails to meet the standard for recusal.
But things didn’t stop there.
Trump announced over the weekend that he plans to begin work on remaking the park on Nov. 15, closing it for 15 months. So much for Trump’s plans being nascent, as the administration had insisted for months. Judge Reyes took judicial notice of Trump’s post on Sunday and asked if it changed the administration’s prior position in the case:
The Court ORDERS that the Government notify it, by 8:00 p.m. today, whether it continues to take the position that it took in its October 16, 2026, filing, that, “there is no final agency action” and that “at most [] the President has given preliminary thought to” the plan to rebuild East Potomac Golf Course.
In its response — signed again only by Associate Attorney General Woodward — the administration insisted nothing had changed.
Then came this morning’s pre-dawn tirade from President Trump in which he called Judge Reyes a “crazed lunatic.”
Another hearing in the case is underway this morning on whether to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the administration’s plan. In her Sunday order, Reyes upped the ante by requiring Woodward and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert N. Stander to appear in person at today’s hearing.
Stay tuned …
We Can Afford to Have Nice Things
WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 18: Logs and debris are piled on the course at East Potomac Golf Links on October 18, 2026 in Washington, DC. The National Park Service confirmed in a filing they had marked over 500 trees for removal as the Trump Administration mulls over a renovation for the golf course. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Until the open clash between Trump and Judge Reyes, I’d hesitated to cover the East Potomac Park case for a national audience because in some ways it’s a parochial D.C. issue and not of the same import as, say, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, the blight of the Trump Triumphal Arch, the renamings of the Kennedy Center and the Institute of Peace, or the unspeakable painting of the intricate exterior of the grand Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
But there’s more going on here than a threat to one public golf course.
For those not familiar, it should be noted that while the public golf course within the historic park is at the center of the dispute, the identity, public use, and access to the park as a whole is at stake. The park features a heavily used paved waterfront loop for walkers, runners, and cyclists. It has a playground and picnic area. People fish, enjoy the views of the D.C. core and northern Virginia, and watch planes taking off and landing from DCA.
The park was created for the public by Congress in the late 19th century and then was built using fill on the tidal mud flats of the Potomac. The low-cost golf course, like two other public courses in D.C. on National Park Service land, has always catered to a broad clientele, trying to keep the sport accessible.
What makes this a national story beyond the clash with Judge Reyes is that the narrowing of public spaces is happening in parallel with the shrinkage of civic life under Trump. The concern is that Trump’s plan would make the golf course more exclusive and less accessible. It would alter the public nature of the park as it has existed for more than 100 years.
Must See
SAN JOSE, CA – Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes alongside her boyfriend Billy Evans, walks back to her hotel following a hearing at the Robert E. Peckham U.S. Courthouse on March 17, 2023 in San Jose, California. Holmes appeared in court for a restitution hearing. (Photo by Philip Pacheco/Getty Images)
Let me join the chorus of reviewers urging you to go see Nathan Fielder’s “You Can See Everything.” It’s among the smartest documentaries I’ve ever seen.
I came to it unfamiliar with Fielder’s previous work and with only passing Wikipedia-level familiarity with the Theranos scandal.
If you’re a Theranos obsessive, you may come away disappointed. It’s not a Theranos documentary. It’s a psychological profile of Elizabeth Homes and of her romantic partner Billy Evans. While it may be tempting to make a judgment on Holmes’ culpability in the Theranos scandal based on Fielder’s work — and audiences probably come out of theaters chatting about exactly that — it would be a mistake.
The Theranos fraud, while inextricably woven into the documentary, exists separate and apart from it. Trials and depositions and financial filings and good investigative reporting already explore the fraud itself in great detail. This isn’t that. (If you feel the strong need for a villain in the documentary, Billy more than fills that role on his own — even though he had nothing to do with Theranos and didn’t first meet Holmes until after the company’s collapse.)
What really sets Fielder’s documentary apart is its acute self-awareness. It grapples openly with the range of challenges that confront documentarians and storytellers: the limits of objectivity, the nature of truth, the intrusive role of the observer, the inevitability of bias, the constraints of narrative forms. I’m barely even getting started. There’s a lot going on.
Fielder inoculates himself against the most obvious criticisms by confronting them as part of the story he’s telling. It gets super meta at times, but it doesn’t lose the thread of the story. I can’t say much more than that without spoiling it for you.
If you’re comfortable with uncertainty, bask in nuance, enjoy the challenge of juggling competing explanations, and can tolerate not having everything reduced to a single “answer,” you’ll delight in this artwork.
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Trump DOJ Sues California
I’ve had my hair on fire the last three days on the Trump administration’s unprecedented new interference in the midterm elections because it represents a high water mark in its effort to intrude in state-run elections.
Sequestering and not counting already-cast ballots — on the dubious grounds that the Trump administration has identified alleged noncitizens who received mail-in ballots — is a dramatic escalation of its month-long attack on state-run federal elections. (It also fits perfectly into the thematics of a GOP campaign largely being run on racist and xenophobic themes in the absence of any affirmative arguments for more of the same.)
But we haven’t really talked about the administration’s end game here, which has now become a little more clear.
At this stage, the administration doesn’t appear to be advancing a strategy to tilt the outcomes in particular elections by disqualifying a significant number of ballots or by suppressing the overall vote. Even if that was its goal, the numbers involved at this point just aren’t big enough.
We learned yesterday in the lawsuit that the Trump DOJ filed against California that its list of “likely noncitizen voters” contained in the vicinity of 20,000 names. I had assumed that the DOJ list was specific to Los Angeles County since acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent his list on an encrypted thumb drive (along with a sticky note containing the password). But the lawsuit says the 20,000 names is a statewide list — “with many addresses listed in Los Angeles County.” (That’s down a wee bit from the 190,000 noncitizen voters that the Trump administration previously claimed California had.)
Even if you account for the atmospherics of the DOJ suing to weed out alleged noncitizen voters having some dampening effect on minority voter turnout, the number of alleged noncitizen voters aren’t anywhere near big enough to have either a significant or predictably pro-GOP effect on election outcomes in California.
So what does that leave as plausible goals for the administration?
Goal #1: Get a federal court somewhere to rule that the law provides a role for the federal government in making sure noncitizens don’t vote
Given what the law says, including the Constitution, legal experts insist it’s a long-shot bid. But it’s a gambit with a high upside and not much political downside. You don’t make shots you don’t take, etc.
That being said, I’m struggling with why the Trump DOJ would pick California as the venue for this gambit versus a reliably red state in a federal circuit that is more obviously MAGA-tilted than the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers California.
(For what it’s worth, the Trump DOJ is trying to get the California case in front of the Trump-appointed judge who presided over Hunter Biden’s tax fraud conviction, arguing that this case is related to an election case he’s already hearing. But there’s nothing about U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi that marks him as a radical MAGA-coded judge. Already fighting back, California wants the case assigned to a Clinton-appointed judge who is already hearing a election case that it claims is more related than Scarsi’s is.)
Ultimately prevailing in the California lawsuit — or in yet-to-be-filed cases in other states — would open the door wide to the Trump administration being able to intervene in the election in much more robust ways under the guise of policing the virtually nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting.
But with less than three weeks until voting ends, it might make more sense to view this as a long-term bid with bigger potential impacts coming after the 2026 election — except in one regard, which brings us to the next goal.
Goal #1A: Create election chaos
In the short term, with Republicans almost certain to lose the House and the Senate increasingly at risk, sowing chaos has mostly upside for the GOP. In that sense, the California lawsuit is less a legal strategy than a political one.
Noncitizen voting is the Big Lie of 2026, so think of this as a prelude to a post-election refusal to accept the results, fights over close individual races, and desperate attempts to salvage a majority in either chamber. Conflicting court rulings, emergency appeals, and a last-ditch bid to get the Supreme Court to decide the election somehow all gin up a crisis atmosphere that’s then used to justify extraordinary interventions of one form or another.
The point isn’t to fear-monger here, but just to note that chaos favors the sure loser desperate to do anything to avoid their fate.
Goal #2: Delegitimizing a Democratic win
Regardless of the outcome of the California lawsuit, the Big Lie of noncitizen voting will inevitably be sustained past the election into the new Congress — as a GOP hand-wave to minimize its own losses, dismiss the Democratic mandate, resist a post-election narrative of MAGA’s demise — and soothe the wounded ego of a certain former reality TV star.
The lawsuit in California helps to fortify that rhetorical argument, even if the Trump DOJ ultimately loses. Time and again, MAGA has seized on setbacks and losses as proof of is own victimhood.
One caveat to all of the above: California may not be the only place that the Trump DOJ decides to do battle on noncitizen voting while voting is underway. It laid the same groundwork in some two dozen states as it did in California by requesting voter information over the past several months in its pursuit of the mythic noncitizen voter, ultimately losing repeatedly in court. If you see evidence of this happening in other states, please let me know. My contact info is linked at the bottom of this post.
And now the Trump administration is attempting to strip Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, of her citizenship so as to deport her. This is more than just another persecution of one of Trump’s political enemies. Rather, his government is tacitly declaring the citizenship of all foreign-born people provisional, their Americanness something that can be revoked. It’s a frontal attack on the idea of constitutional equality.
Uneven Playing Field Alert
Your occasional reminder that U.S. elections are, by law, tilted in favor of monied interests to a greater extent than at any point since at least the Gilded Age:
NYT: Avalanche of G.O.P. Cash Keeps the Party Competitive Despite Its Problems
Politico: Megadonors are powering Republicans’ spending advantage
NYT: Most of Ken Paxton’s Money Can Be Traced to One Man: Elon Musk
See You Back Here Monday
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There’s nothing quite like a cozy sweater on a chilly fall evening. It’s finally that time of year again, as we’re well into October. You can put away your summer clothes and reintroduce your favorite sweaters into your daily wardrobe. There’s something particularly comforting about 2010s emo music when you’re wearing an oversized sweater on a fall day. These three emo bands of the 2010s are essential for capturing that feeling.
The Wonder Years
In 2011, The Wonder Years began distancing themselves from their pop-punk signature sound and leaned into emo. Their heartfelt third album, Suburbia I’ve Given You All, And Now I’m Nothing, became one of the most important emo releases in the early 2010s. It’s the perfect album for this time of year. They even have a track called “Hoodie Weather”, capturing that feeling of slipping into a hoodie on a chilly evening. The Philadelphia band penned their magnum opus with this album, and it perfectly parallels the transition from fall into winter.
Citizen
Another release from 2011 that ranks as one of the most important emo releases of the 2010s is Citizen’s debut EP, Young States. I specifically remember discovering the EP while scrolling through Tumblr. Within one listen, I could tell these guys were about to set the direction for a new wave of emo. That’s exactly what happened.
Citizen brilliantly capitalized on the momentum from their debut EP and their 2012 split release with Turnover, releasing their debut album, Youth, in 2013. With this, the band was officially at the forefront of the fourth wave of emo. Their 2015 follow-up, Everybody Is Going To Heaven, went to No. 1 on the US Heatseekers Albums chart. They continued that success and helped revive vinyl sales with As You Please in 2017, peaking at No. 12 on the US Vinyl Albums chart.
Title Fight
Another band that caught everyone’s attention with a debut EP is Title Fight. Their 2009 EP, The Last Thing You Forget, perfectly blended elements of pop punk and emo. With this, the band predicted the next phase of emo bands. Title Fight ushered in the fourth wave of emo, releasing their debut album Shed in 2011. At this point, the new direction of emo was being largely controlled by Pennsylvania bands. The Wonder Years out of Philadelphia and Title Fight out of Kingston, PA, both released captivating emo albums in 2011. This ignited the fourth wave of emo, launching an emo revival in the 2010s.
For transparency reasons, I like peeling back the curtain on any changes we make to Morning Memo — but doing so always runs the risk of creating some confusion. So let me be really clear upfront: The change I’m about to mention doesn’t require you to do anything differently on your end.
Beginning next week, we’re going to be using a new email provider to send out Morning Memo each day. If you already receive Morning Memo by email, it will still come to you the same as usual, but it will come directly from TPM instead of from Substack. It might look a tad different in your inbox — and the email itself will look more like TPM — so I wanted you to be aware in advance.
You’ll still be able to read Morning Memo in the email version or on Substack or at TPM. Your choice.
We’re making this change because in this deeply fractured media world, we’re trying to build out the TPM ecosystem and not be overly reliant on outside platforms. Better to live and die on our own merits than be subject to the vagaries of third parties.
OK, let’s get to today’s news.
A Hugely Important Distinction
As I feared, the developing story on the Trump DOJ targeting actual ballots in Los Angeles County is creating some confusion.
I tried in yesterday’s Morning Memo to make clear that this was different in kind and degree from the Trump administration’s previous efforts to purge voter rolls in advance of the election. But the reactions I’ve seen since, both to what I wrote and in the larger coverage, suggest that’s still not coming across entirely clearly.
Ironically, the Trump DOJ turns out to be helpful in this regard because it’s now admitted to NBC News that this is in fact different from a purge of voter rolls: “A DOJ spokesperson said the department is asking California to sequester ballots, not change their voter list.”
Now, the Trump DOJ has its own reasons for making that distinction, among them trying to get around the federal statute that bars the mass purging of voter rolls in the 90 days before the election. But in this instance what the Trump DOJ is saying also happens to be true — and the truth is even more damning. Its election interference is no longer hypothetical; it’s happening now while real ballots are being cast.
Once you make the category distinction between voter rolls and actual ballots already cast or soon to be cast, the seriousness of the threat from the federal government becomes a lot more obvious. The Trump DOJ is demanding that a specific batch of ballots be sequestered and not counted until citizenship is confirmed — an additional step in the tabulation process not provided for by law and which experts say would lead to a rushed and sloppy process that likely to disenfranchise legal voters.
The threat is serious even if the Trump DOJ is unable to cite any lawful authority for its demand to California and even if there is no legal basis for it to order states to sequester ballots of people the Trump DOJ claims to have identified as “likely noncitizen voters.”
With that framework in mind, let’s run through the latest developments and the big questions still outstanding …
The Latest From California …
READ: The Oct. 13 demand letter that acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter (the No. 2 official at DOJ!) sent to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber.
READ: McCotter sent a virtually identical letter to Dean Logan, the top election official in Los Angeles County.
A “Sticky Note”!?! In a statement, Secretary of State Weber revealed that the “password-protected thumb drive” containing the Trump DOJ’s list of “likely noncitizen voters” that McCotter references in his letters was accompanied by … wait for it … a sticky note with the password on it. Top notch information security going on there at the Trump DOJ.
Say More About “Election Integrity”: Popping an unsecured thumb drive (see sticky note above) into a USB port in your election office is just not something election administrators not named Tina Peters would dream of doing. “We have not accessed the drive because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols,” Logan, the Los Angeles County election official, said in a statement. “We do not consider the device a secure medium.” This is not the first time that the “election integrity” crowd has revealed how little regard it has for actual secure processes and procedures.
JUST IN: Trump DOJ List Challenged in Court
This morning, the UCLA Voting Rights Project, on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and a Los Angeles resident, sought a temporary restraining order to preempt the Trump DOJ’s actions in California.
The requested TRO, filed in an existing case in D.C. against Attorney General Todd Blanche and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, seeks to block the Trump DOJ from coercing California officials into using its purported list of “likely noncitizen voters” to withhold ballots from voters or to segregate and not count ballots already cast.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan did not immediately scheduled a hearing on the TRO but set a deadline of 5 p.m. ET Friday for the parties to file a proposed briefing schedule.
What We Still Don’t Know
The big outstanding questions include:
How many people are on the Trump DOJ list? Since McCotter doesn’t say in his letters and California officials haven’t even opened the file, we don’t know how long the Trump DOJ’s list of “likely noncitizen voters” actually is. A DOJ spokesperson allowed to the LA Times that the number is “in the thousands.” That’s a pretty big range.
Did all or just some California counties receive a similar letter from the Trump DOJ? Similar letters were mailed out to other California counties, CBS News reports, but it’s not clear if it went to all or just some of them.
Has the Trump DOJ targeted other states with similar demand letters? While the thrust of the Trump DOJ’s election-chaos has been aimed at blue states, there are tight House races in red states, too, where chaos might serve to delegitimize election results unfavorable to the GOP. Also worth noting that red state officials might be cooperative and not as quick to go public as California officials were.
If you know of similar efforts by the Trump DOJ in other states, please get in touch with me via the encrypted methods here.
‘Amateur Hour at the Department of Justice’
UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen, in a not-so-succinct headline: “DOJ’s Threat Letter to California Voting Officials with a 48-Hour Deadline is Amateurish Political Theater Aimed at Sowing Chaos, Not to Mention a Demand That Likely Violates Federal Law and Election Security Practices”
The Retribution: Ilhan Omar Edition
The one-two punch of retributive investigations of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by both the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice is looking worse the more that comes out:
Denaturalization Is Trump’s Goal: The WSJ confirms that the investigation of Omar is “aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her.”
Flashback: D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who touted her office’s role in the DOJ investigation of Omar during a Fox News appearance this week, was suspended by the same network in 2019, when she hosted a show there, for on-air comments about Omar: “Omar wears a hijab, which, according to the Quran 33:59, tells women to cover so they won’t get molested.” Pirro said at the time. “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”
Speech or Debate Clause: U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh of D.C. did in fact limit the scope of the search warrant for Omar’s D.C. home after a protracted back and forth, CNN reports. In doing so, Sharbaugh reportedly cited precedent that preserves the protections for member of Congress contained in the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Nonetheless, Omar’s phone was among the items seized during the search of her home, NBC News reports.
Trump: Execute the Leakers
Trump: "In my opinion, leakers should be shot. In the old days we used to shoot leakers."
In a major escalation of its multi-prong attempts to interfere in the midterm elections, the Trump DOJ has given California 48 hours to take steps to prevent an unknown number of alleged noncitizen voters in Los Angeles County from voting — or face legal action, Reuters exclusively reports.
This new Trump DOJ initiative is different from its earlier, largely unsuccessful efforts to obtain voter information from various states. Instead, it is now demanding that Los Angeles County take affirmative steps to prevent the counting of ballots cast by people on a list provided by DOJ who it alleges are “likely noncitizen voters” who received mail-in ballots.
The Trump DOJ’s demands came in the form of a threat letter Tuesday to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber from acting Deputy Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter — an extraordinary intervention by the department’s No. 2 official.
The existence of the letter was confirmed by the Justice Department. It’s not clear how DOJ came up with its list, which was provided to Los Angeles County on a “password-protected thumb drive.” Past attempts by the Trump administration to identify noncitizens who are allegedly registered to vote have been deeply flawed and wildly inaccurate.
In the letter, McCotter sets an arbitrary 48-hour deadline for California to review the DOJ list, but the more alarming development is what other steps McCotter demands that California take, according to Reuters:
refuse to send ballots to people who appear on the DOJ list until their citizenship status has been confirmed;
segregate the mail-in ballots already returned by people who appear on the DOJ list;
don’t count the mail-in ballots of those on the DOJ list until their citizenship status has been confirmed.
These are the most aggressive steps the Trump administration has taken in its jihad against mythical noncitizen voting, which it greatly exaggerates as a pretext for the federal takeover of elections, the delegitimization of free and fair elections, and the disregard of election results that it disfavors.
“Allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” McCotter wrote in the letter, echoing one element of the Trump administration’s long-running disinformation campaign. McCotter threatened to seek emergency relief in court if California does not comply with his demands.
The latest move — challenging entire batches of ballots and threatening to go to court unless Los Angeles County undertakes specific steps in its handling of the election — comes as the election in California is already underway. Mail-in ballots were sent out to every voter in the state beginning on Oct. 5, the same day that ballot drop-off centers opened statewide.
This is the kind of Trump administration interference that election officials nationwide have been dreading and planning for this entire election cycle. The executive branch has no constitutional role in the conduct of federal elections, which is delegated to the states.
It’s not yet clear if the Trump DOJ sent similar demand letters to election officials in other states.
Essayli Likely to be Booted As LA USA
In another blow to President Trump’s U.S. attorneys scheme in blue states, a federal judge appears poised to disqualify Bill Essayli as the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bloomberg reports.
Essayli was already disqualified by the court from serving as acting U.S. attorney, but the Trump DOJ tried to sidestep that ruling by making Essayli the first assistant U.S. attorney — with all the powers to run the office.
But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a similar case in Nevada, ruled that first assistants assume the power of the U.S. attorney only if they were already installed when the office was vacated.
Not Just DHS — DOJ Targets Rep. Omar, Too
D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is stumbling all over herself to get in on the targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by the Trump administration.
The day after DHS’ Homeland Security Investigations executed a search warrant on Omar’s D.C. home in a what appears to be a bogus investigation into how her late father obtained naturalized U.S. citizenship, Pirro went on Fox News to declare that Omar is under separate DOJ investigation over her financial disclosure forms.
The public announcement of a criminal investigation by Pirro would be highly irregular at any time, but especially coming just three weeks before the election, further cementing the politicized nature of the Trump administration’s targeting of Omar … as if there was any doubt.
In the immigration investigation, family members of Omar have been issued grand jury subpoenas, the NYT reports.
DOJ Stiffed Minnesota Over ICE Shootings
You can be forgiven for thinking that the Trump DOJ had relented after six months and began sharing evidence with Minnesota in the three ICE shootings during Operation Metro Surge. Hennepin County prosecutor Mary Moriarty held a press conference in July announcing the evidence-sharing agreement that had been reached with DOJ.
But in new court filings yesterday, Minnesota officials, including Moriarty, revealed that the Trump DOJ ceased cooperating again after her press conference. And the impression they leave is that the agreement, which was struck with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis and led to an initial round of evidence sharing, was quickly scotched by Main Justice after news of it broke.
In her declaration, Moriarty says that she spoke with U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen on Sept. 10, “who told me, in sum and substance, that evidence sharing from the USAO as agreed to in the June 26 letter would be on pause indefinitely ‘in light of challenges with D.C.’”
The new revelations come in a federal lawsuit that Minnesota filed in D.C. seeking to obtain evidence gathered by DHS and DOJ in the shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Minnesota has already charged ICE agent Christian Castro in the Sosa-Celis shooting.
Texas Considers Charges Against ICE Agent
In Houston, the district attorney is considering charging an ICE agent who allegedly ran his vehicle over a Mexican national Saturday with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. ICE’s claim that the man ran in front of the ICE agent’s vehicle is undermined by security camera footage showing the car veering toward the fleeing man. One of his legs was broken, not both, as previously reported.
Thread of the Day
WOW. Kristi Noem and Elon Musk, among others, "chose to turn the power of the federal government against a singular employee with an impeccable record of public service. … The attacks against Ms. Comans were based entirely on false information" and many officials "knew [they] were untrue."
After firing the publisher and editor of Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon has installed one of its own public affairs officials to run the once-independent military newspaper — and he will keep his Pentagon job while doing it, Military.com reports.
In “The Dawn Of The Self-Funding Pentagon,” Spencer Ackerman warns of the dangers of the “deal” that the Trump administration has stuck to give the Pentagon an equity position in Venezuela’s oil fields outside of the congressional appropriations process: “This is a step in the direction of the U.S. military holding a revenue-generating stake in sectors of another country’s civilian economy.”
AI Did Me In: The Kim Guilfoyle Story
US Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle attends the opening of the Sixth round of the GreeceU.S. Strategic Dialogue in plenary format, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Athens, Greece on October 7, 2026. (Photo by Dimitris Kapantais / SOOC / AFP via Getty Images)
All the credit to the WSJ for the devastating series of stories that led to the forced resignation of Kimberly Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece. In surveying the aftermath of its work, the newspaper had a few more gems to drop about Guilfoyle’s final days:
Bad self portraits (the lyrics from the Lake Street Dive song are unbelievably on point): Guilfoyle decorated the official ambassadorial residence with large self-portraits.
AI did it: After the second major WSJ story, which relied on text messages showing her soliciting a major GOP donor to pay off her $100,000 Amex bill, Guilfoyle told White House officials that the text messages were AI-generated. “The officials didn’t believe her claims,” according to the WSJ.
Did she find out at the same time we did? This account raises the possibility that Guilfoyle found out that she was being asked to resign when it was announced by the White House, although that is not the only plausible interpretation:
During a Tuesday-morning prep session for his new press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first briefing at the White House, the president instructed Zacharia to tell the world that he was asking Guilfoyle to resign, people familiar with the matter said. Trump didn’t speak directly to Guilfoyle before making the decision, one of the people said.
News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means you only have a little time to create the perfect playlist. If you experienced the 2000s as a scene kid, then you’re aware that a lot of the bands fit perfectly with this time of year. Here are three emo bands that belong on your Halloween playlist this year.
Chiodos
It’s the time of year for horror. In the 2000s, Chiodos were the premier horror band, though many may not realize it. Even their name, Chiodos, comes from the famous Chiodos brothers. They wrote and directed the 1988 sci-fi horror film Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Additionally, they handled the special effects on Halloween classic films such as Clitters and Ernest Scared Stupid.
Their lyrical content was inspired by their love for gore and horror, with scenes detailing murders with lots of blood and everything else spooky. Any songs from the band’s 2007 debut, All’s Well Ends Well, or their follow-up 2008 masterpiece, Bone Palace Ballet, would be the perfect additions to your Halloween playlist. You may even turn a new fan to their music, as they’re often overlooked in the world of emo.
My Chemical Romance
It doesn’t get any more Halloween-y than My Chemical Romance. In the mid-2000s, fans adopted their looks from music videos and turned every day into Halloween. This time of the year is celebratory for My Chemical Romance. Each year, it reminds them of their very first show on October 1, 2001, at an Elk’s Lodge in Ewing Township, New Jersey. The band will celebrate 25 years as a band in 2026. Help celebrate with My Chemical Romance by filling your playlist with their timeless emo classics.
The Used
Much like Chiodos, The Used also explored dark themes in their lyrics. This can be heard on tracks such as “Slit Your Own Throat”, “Dark Days”, and “Choke Me”. They’re another band that is often associated with this time of year. Also, their close friendship with My Chemical Romance in the 2000s makes the bands adjacent, with many crossover fans. Especially when the two bands recorded a cover in 2004 of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure”. At one point, fans speculated about a brewing feud when The Used singer Bert McCracken made remarks about Gerard Way’s artistic integrity. He later apologized and spoke publicly about how Way inspired him to seek sobriety in the early 2010s. Fans of both bands love the happy ending.
It’s easy to get tripped up by the sheer volume of Trump II depredations — the corruption, the retribution, the destruction, and the absurdity of it all. Add in the proximity of the midterm elections, and there’s a risk of falling into the pedantry of category distinctions.
What’s an election interference gambit versus an appeal to racism? What’s a fit of retribution versus an attack on the constitutional order? What’s an abuse of power versus conspiracizing? One easy framing adjustment is simply to use “and” or “all of the above.”
The unparalleled early holiday morning search by federal agents of the D.C. home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) three weeks before the election perfectly captures the importance of allowing for an “all of the above” category. Otherwise, you can’t truly make sense of it all.
An Attack on Elections
An overt investigatory step against a sitting member of Congress up for election in three weeks is an astonishingly brazen abuse of power. The DOJ norm to refrain from such actions within 60 days of an election doesn’t quite do justice to how out of the ordinary this search was.
The DOJ norm was put in place before the widespread use of mail-in ballots stretched out Election Day from a single date to a rolling two-month election, which would caution restraint even farther out. And in fact even in the old days, notable developments in investigations, in my experience, tended to slow by the summer, after the primaries had locked in the candidates for the general election.
This is precisely the kind of pre-election ugliness we talked about Friday.
An Attack on Naturalized Citizens
The purported basis for the investigation of Omar is immigration fraud — based on a persistent but baseless far-right conspiracy that decades ago, when she was 12, her now-deceased father schemed his way into the country illegally.
The search warrant, as described to the New York Times, lists “potential immigration crimes under investigation, including false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, as well as a general conspiracy charge.”
The underlying theory of the case, such as it is, is that Omar should be denaturalized. It makes the citizenship of all naturalized citizens contingent and dependent on who is holding power at any given time.
An Attack on Somalis
Black women — see, e.g., Lisa Cook, Fani Willis, Letitia James — are a favorite target of Trump. Omar is Black and Somali and from Minnesota, a trifecta of Trump race-baiting, smearing, and dehumanizing. The search of her home came just a few days after Trump tried to instigate Minnesotans into a race war against Somalis. The message is so rancid: Omar doesn’t belong here, conned her way in (as a child), defrauded her way to financial prosperity, and has no right to be here, let alone in Congress.
An Attack on Congress
The executive branch enforcing the law against members of the legislative branch has always required a delicate balance of constitutional imperatives. There is nothing delicate or well-balanced about Trump’s ongoing attacks on Congress’ constitutional role. The Omar investigation is another in a series of threats against all members of Congress and against the legislative branch’s constitutional role.
An Attack on Elected Democrats
The Omar search is made worse because it comes after President Trump targeted her for years and publicly announced in January that a criminal investigation of her was underway. He has made the retribution element abundantly clear. It’s part of his broader attack on elected Dems — not merely a rhetorical attack but an abuse of his office to unleash the power of the federal government against his political foes.
It is all of the above — and more.
One other notable element of this retributive investigation: It is being helmed by Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of DHS, not DOJ. HSI has been in the lead on some of the most glaring retributive investigations in recent months. With a bloated budget, DHS, across its many component agencies, has police and investigatory powers that lets the Trump White House bypass or sideline DOJ. The FBI and DOJ aren’t sidelined completely. HSI can’t prosecute cases without DOJ, and DOJ had a role in obtaining the search warrant for Omar’s home (which, dismayingly, a D.C. federal judge signed off on). But this adds to the evidence that DHS is Trump’s favored tool of authoritarianism.
If there was any doubt that the Omar case is being run out of the White House, the administration did little to hide it. A senior Trump administration official told the Washington Post that in addition to Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow, the investigation involved White House deputy homeland security adviser Anthony Salisbury. I can’t emphasize enough how far over the cliff’s edge we are with White House-directed investigations.
The worst predictions of what a second Trump term would be like are coming true right before our eyes.
Thread of the Day
There will be a lot of equivocating about all the times search warrants have been executed on members of Congress for corruption investigations and the like, and it can't be stressed enough in how many ways HSI raiding Ilhan Omar is extremely not like that.
It’s not just Ilhan Omar. You can feel the ramping up of retribution from President Trump as the midterm election draws closer:
Free press: In another in a series of targeted attacks on the press by the Trump administration, the Trump DOJ has purported to launch an antitrust investigation against ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC over their pool coverage of the White House. The move comes after the networks banded together to boycott President Trump’s ban of CNN from the White House.
Federal Reserve: President Trump renewed his effort to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board, establishing a committee to “investigate” the bogus mortgage fraud charges the administration has ginned up against her.
ICC: The Trump administration imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court on Friday within hours of one of its former judges winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Lawlessness: Defiance of Judges Edition
D.C.: U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of D.C. damned near lost her mind in an emergency hearing over the Trump administration’s holiday weekend removal of more than 400 trees from a National Park Service golf course in the nation’s capital that President Trump wants to redesign unilaterally. Reyes had previously ordered that the Trump administration provide notice to the plaintiffs before any major changes were made to the course — and time for the court to address them. Instead, the administration provided notice at 5 p.m. on the Friday of a three-day weekend and removed the trees on Saturday. Reyes became the latest federal judge to rue having trusted the administration and given it the benefit of the doubt. “I trusted you all not to do precisely what you have done,” she said.
New York: The Trump DOJ apologized to a federal judge in Manhattan after pro-Trump TV ads paid for by the federal government continued to air after the court ordered an immediate halt to the ads on Sunday evening. The DOJ lawyer told the judge that he emailed her temporary restraining order blocking the ads to DHS counsel 72 minutes after it was issued, but DHS counsel didn’t see the email until the next morning. Notably, the Trump DOJ had stopped short of defending the legality of the ads in court, arguing instead that the ads were already scheduled to stop running so the case was moot.
Trump DOJ Watch
Florida/D.C.: After losing its last two chief prosecutors, the “grand conspiracy” investigation in south Florida is now being run out of Main Justice, the Wall Street Journal reports: “Lawyers in the deputy attorney general’s office are now directly overseeing the Florida-based investigation from Washington, officials said.”
Nationwide: “[M]ore than 60 people charged in the past few months as part of a surge by the Justice Department to prosecute as many noncitizen voters as possible before November’s midterm elections,” the WSJ reports.
Arizona: A federal judge sanctioned a DOJ attorney in an immigration case for making a “factually baseless” accusation against the immigrant’s attorney. The DOJ lawyer was ordered to undergo at least one hour each of continuing legal education on (i) the special role of U.S. attorneys; and (ii) the need for evidentiary support for all factual contentions.
Midterms Watch
Texas-Senate: To celebrate the arrival of 2025, Ken Paxton partied in Dubai with his girlfriend and two fugitives from the U.S., the WSJ reports.
Nebraska-Senate: The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC for the Senate GOP leadership, is pouring in another $8 million to save Sen. Pete Ricketts (R- NE), bringing its total spend in the race to $15 million.
NYT: Inside Elon Musk’s $276 Million Midterm Rescue Mission for Republicans
Trump Mocks Protester Assaulted at His Rally
holy shit — a protester at the Trump rally gets physically assaulted after they interrupt the rally by a man who punches her in the face. Trump smears the protester as a "fat guy"
Surveillance video captured an ICE agent appearing to strike a fleeing immigrant Saturday morning near Houston. The man, who was apparently not the initial target of ICE, reportedly suffered two broken legs in the incident.
No More Kimberly Guilfoyle to Kick Around
PARIS, FRANCE – JANUARY 29: Kimberly Guilfoyle, Nikolas Tsakos, and Carla Bruni attend the Celia Kritharioti Haute Couture Week Spring/Summer 2026 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on January 29, 2026 in Paris, France. (Photo by Pierre Suu/Getty Images)
Even as President Trump was publicly dangling the possibility of firing Kimberly Guilfoyle, the WSJ was cranking out another in its series of wtf stories on the U.S. ambassador to Greece: “At Davos, Kimberly Guilfoyle Boasted of Private Jet Trips, Luxury Stays.”
The WSJ didn’t just have witnesses to Guilfoyle’s grasping at Davos in January. It had a recording of her, too. Some of these quotes, y’all:
To an American businessman whose help she wanted getting into a dinner thrown by Greek House Davos for Eric Trump: “You know, I can deliver the world to you. Which you deserve. … “I’m going to make you a lot of f—ing money.”
Furious that she wasn’t invited to the dinner: “You don’t have the f—ing U.S., you know, ambassador to Greece not come. She should be kissing my f—ing ass.”
Bragging on her ties to Greek shipping tycoon Nikolas Tsakos: “I see Nikos every f—ing day. … I’m flying with him to Paris. I’m with him for a f—ing week. … He loves me. Honey, I spent Christmas with him. New Years. OK? Gstaad. Like, everywhere.”
Alas, we learned this morning from the White House press secretary that President Trump has asked Guilfoyle to resign. It was fun while it lasted.
News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
We’ve endured some very dark days in Trump II, but yesterday was particularly grim — and a possible taste of what’s to come between now and Election Day.
President Trump launched a race war against Somalians and Somali-Americans in Minnesota.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exuberantly announced that the holiday season execution by firing squad of former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan for the Ft. Hood shooting will be live-streamed.
In New York City, an ICE agent shot and wounded a Dominican national who was in his car with his 5-year-old child in the backseat.
In a televised debate in the Michigan Senate race, GOP nominee Mike Rogers used Islamophobic smears to baselessly associate Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed with terrorism — after which President Trump called El-Sayed a “Terrorist Sympathizer” in a social media post.
Somehow, the Michigan Senate debate was worse than the Georgia Senate debate, where GOP nominee Rep. Mike Collins has so many ties to neo-Nazis that it’s hard to keep count, prompting Sen. Jon Ossoff to scoff that Collins had “hired half the Third Reich” in his congressional office.
Against that backdrop, the Trump DOJ is actively seeking to vindictively prosecute former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for allegedly lying to Congress as the star witness in the Jan. 6 committee hearings.
While the chaos of Trump II is often erratic and unpredictable, yesterday’s events are all tied to the upcoming election one way or the other. Even the ICE shooting came only two days after ICE increased its daily quota back to 3,000 arrests a day ahead of the midterms. The collective desperation of Trump and the GOP to avert a disastrous electoral defeat is likely to produce some even darker days over the next three and half weeks.
Reaction of the Day
Sen. Chris Murphy stunned as he hears for the first time that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to livestream a firing squad execution, describing the decision as “disgusting” and “medieval.” pic.twitter.com/SR0E6hS67k
The vindictive prosecution of Cassidy Hutchinson is being improbably spearheaded by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. It would normally have absolutely no role in pursuing this kind of case, but the division is led by the ambitious Harmeet Dhillon, who is eager to audition for a promotion.
Dhillon’s team began presenting purported evidence against Hutchinson to a D.C. federal grand jury this week. While most of the reports cast it as investigation into whether Hutchison lied to Congress, the Washington Post, citing an unnamed source, suggests there maybe a twist: “[P]rosecutors have been exploring charging Hutchinson with a civil rights violation, potentially bringing a more unusual case than a simple charge of lying to Congress, one of the people familiar said.”
In Other Vindictive Prosecution News …
A federal judge has cleared the way for Kseniia Petrova to conduct discovery into whether she was the victim of vindictive prosecution by the Trump administration. Petrova is the Harvard researcher who was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport in February 2025 and later charged with smuggling for bringing frog embryo samples into the country for her research.
New Info on Kurt Olsen’s Failed Polygraph
The exact circumstances of the failed polygraph of Trump DOJ official Kurt Olsen keep dribbling out. The latest, from the New York Times (emphasis mine):
It turned out he had failed a polygraph test about his contacts with foreigners, which imperiled his security clearance, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Olsen said he complied with all requirements regarding foreign contacts and had not resigned over his clearance, but declined to say more.
Kimpossibly Dumb
With everything else going on, the Kimberly Guilfoyle scandal is almost a welcome relief — a Molière comedy of the Trump era.
The official responses to the Wall Street Journal blockbuster were quite unimpressive.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio spewed a lot of bluster in refusing to answer any questions about his ambassador to Greece — but he also offered no defense of Kimberly Guilfoyle:
Vice President JD Vance was similarly unenthusiastic about rushing to Guilfoyle’s defense:
JD Vance dodges a question on Kimberly Guilfoyle asking a donor for $100k in exchange for political access:"Well, so… with, with that hypothetical, obviously I don't love that. But, you know, I don't know exactly who you're talking about. I don't know the full details."
If there’s one thing to know about the latest Guilfoyle scandal, it’s that her accuser doesn’t exactly fit the profile of the most reliable narrator. So the WSJ really had to bring the receipts, as it describes here.
Making matters worse for her is that her accuser seems to love the spotlight and spent the day talking to damn near any TV news outlet that would listen.
ABC:
CBS:
CNN:
'There was no question it was a quid pro quo. She knew she was nominated. She tried to cover it up.' MAGA Donor Eric Deters talks with @jaketapper about Amb. Kim Guilfoyle asking him for $100K. pic.twitter.com/q8Wz6GSxP5
With so few Trump scandals truly breaking through into the broader cultural zeitgeist, Guilfoyle’s brazenness, shamelessness, and sloppiness have combined to potentially make her the rare exception.
Kimmel:
The Daily Show:
Have a Good Holiday Weekend
See you back here Tuesday.
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Since the dawn of Trump II, Stephen Miller has been the barely hidden hand running the Justice Department from the White House. Now a new report from CBS News adds quite a bit more detail to the level of influence and control that Miller exerts over the Trump DOJ.
The story is framed around an apparent conflict of interest. Miller attended an counterterrorism training session at FBI headquarters on Sept. 29 that was focused on President Trump’s notorious NSPM-7 on domestic terrorism and political violence. Miller urged the federal agents in attendance to be more aggressive in pursuing threats against government officials and their families — at the same time he was an alleged victim and potential witness in a case of alleged threats to his wife, Katie. Miller was reportedly frustrated by the pace of the criminal investigation into the allegedly threatening communications.
“In his comments, Miller spoke about the need for federal law enforcement agents to be more proactive in investigating threat cases and told them that no case is too small, whether the threats are directed toward a congressman, a spouse, friends, loved ones or a speaker at a college campus, the senior FBI official said,” according to CBS News.
The top two FBI agents in the counterterrorism division of the FBI Washington Field Office were demoted last month over “frustration shared by the Miller family” that the Katie Miller case was moving too slowly. Their demotions reportedly factored into the resignation of FBI co-deputy director Andrew Bailey, although the FBI publicly dimissed that reporting as “fake news.”
Two days after Miller spoke to federal agents at the training session, a Massachusetts man was indicted for cyberstalking on Oct. 1 — despite reported concerns from career prosecutors in Boston that his communications to Katie Miller didn’t amount to a federal crime. He was charged with using interstate communications with the intent to harass and intimidate by sending her at least 40 calls, voicemails, and text messages in August and September, some of them crude and profane.
But a glaring conflict of interest is just one element of this story, and probably not the most important one.
Notably, this episode appears to be a subset of the Trump administration’s broader push to lump all threats together with legitimate political opposition and brand them as domestic terrorism. The criminalization of political opposition to Trump is one of the darkest through-lines of his second term.
In this episode, two things jump out: (i) Miller picked a counterterrorism training session to urge more aggressive action in cases involving threats and harassment, citing the assassination of Charlie Kirk; and (ii) Katie Miller’s alleged cyberstalker was “arrested by members of the F.B.I.’s joint terrorism task force, an unusual show of force for a cyberstalking case,” the NYT noted last week.
In other words, what might have normally been a local law enforcement matter is now federalized and turned into a counterterrorism investigation. The Trump White House went so far as to defend Miller’s presence at the training session on domestic terrorism grounds, telling CBS News that Miller is tasked with carrying out the NSPM-7 mandate to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle all stages of organized political violence and domestic terrorism.”
The other big picture issue is the one Morning Memo keeps coming back to: the mind-blowing fact of an unabashedly political White House aide addressing federal agents at FBI headquarters. The DOJ, including the FBI, being run out of the White House remains the defining corrupt act of the Trump II presidency.
The CBS News story — co-bylined by Sarah N. Lynch, a superb reporter on the DOJ beat — goes quite a bit further in revealing how involved Miller is in the running of the Justice Department:
In an earlier episode, Miller pressured the DOJ to take action against a Virginia political activist who protested outside of the Millers’ Arlington home and distributed their address on flyers. A federal magistrate judge twice rejected search warrant applications in the case, CBS News previously reported.
In the Virginia case, Miller asked FBI counterterrorism agents to go undercover in his neighborhood’s political activist group and regularly called the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the the Eastern District of Virginia for updates.
Miller has been holding monthly meetings with the heads of federal law enforcement agencies about the deployments of the National Guard and federal agents to D.C. and Memphis in Trump’s “violent crime crackdown.”
“Miller is also in touch multiple times a week with the Deputy Attorney General’s office to discuss fraud and immigration cases, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter,” according to CBS News. The DAG is essentially the chief operations officer at DOJ and runs the department day to day.
Miller’s meddling (which may be too weak of word) at DOJ is truly unprecedented. He is the tip of Trump’s spear aimed at politicizing the Justice Department.
Kurt Olsen Reportedly Failed a Polygraph
Kurt Olsen — the Big Lie proponent who stepped down as the lead prosecutor in the bogus investigation into a “grand conspiracy” by the Deep State to deprive Donald Trump of his civil rights — had his DOJ security clearance terminated last month after failing a polygraph test, Reuters reports.
‘I Can Do Whatever I Want, If I Want’
Trump: "I could've done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could've done very very bad things to Joe Biden. I could've done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama … I can do whatever I want, if I want."
The American Prospect: In an important development, U.S. District Judge John C. Hinderaker, a Trump appointee in Arizona, has ordered DHS to “facilitate” the return to the United States of an Egyptian man that it deported to Equatorial Guinea, a country where he has no ties. As reporter Gillian Brockell notes, the ruling “could have far-reaching implications for thousands of others subjected to the Trump administration’s third-country removal scheme.”
Washington Sun: In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Gary R. Brown, a Trump appointee in Brooklyn, condemned ICE agents for falsifying records to cover up a pair of bad arrests. “The evidence suggests that ICE attempted to support their unsupported misidentification argument through false or misleading documentation and testimony,” Brown concluded.
CNN: ICE told agents nationwide on Tuesday to increase immigration arrests by 1,000 people per day, returning to a previous goal of 3,000 daily arrests.
Quote of the Day
“On Monday night, it was our understanding that Christa was brain dead and that life support would be removed the next day. But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone, including me, including her team, including the medical team, Christa woke up and began talking.”—Randy Spivey, a lawyer for Christa Pike, on her recovery from Tennessee’s attempted execution
The Corruption: Kimberly Guilfoyle Edition
US Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle speaks during a dedication ceremony at the chancery of the US Embassy in Athens, on October 7, 2026. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)
The WSJ manages to outdo its remarkable story last month on Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador to Greece and former fiancée of Don Jr., with a follow-up bombshell.
I started to summarize the highlights, but I really can’t do it justice. Just go read it.
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Republican political consultants are practically falling over each other to make the most dire pronouncements about the GOP’s fate in the midterms.
“If the bottom continues falling out like it has been, this will be worse than 2006,” one national Republican strategist tells Politico. Democrats picked up 31 seats that year and ended 12 years of GOP control of the House.
I’m deeply skeptical of poll-driven narratives in election coverage — which the past few cycles have only reinforced — but there’s quite a bit more to go on than just public opinion surveys in assessing the state of the midterms. Between now and Election Day, I’ll be frequently including in Morning Memo a sampling of those additional data points: which races are being newly contested and which aren’t, where the spending is going and where it’s not, and other markers on the state of the race — including President Trump’s unscripted intemperate outbursts.
The Cook Political Report on Tuesday moved three Senate races in Democrats’ favor:
Kansas from Lean Republican to Toss Up
North Carolina from Lean Democrat to Likely Democrat
New Hampshire from Toss Up to Lean Democrat
In deep-red South Carolina, appointed Sen. Darline Graham (R) is struggling to hold on to her late brother’s seat, forcing the Senate Leadership Fund to dump $5 million into her race against Dr. Annie Andrews. In a sign of the brewing trouble for the GOP, Trump went on a “crazed, manic tirade” this week against Andrews, using an anti-trans slur among other attacks.
On the House side, in a sign of increasing desperation, Republicans have quietly resumed backing Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) despite earlier calls from within the party for him to drop out of the race amidst allegations against him of domestic abuse.
Election Ratfuckery Alert
The Trump administration continues to pull levers and push buttons to try to abuse the power of the federal government to swing the election its way:
The Department of Homeland Security has investigated more than 150 voter registration groups in search of evidence that they’re helping noncitizens illegally register to vote, according to internal documents obtained via FOIA and provided to the New York Times. The DHS effort has been most heavily focused on groups in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. DHS has considered using undercover agents in its investigations, the documents reveal. Also of note:
The documents also reveal that Heather Honey, a prominent 2020 election denier who now serves as the department’s point person on “election integrity,” provided 48.4 million records of unknown provenance to federal investigators who are trying to find noncitizens on the voter rolls.
The Trump DOJ dispatched federal prosecutors and an FBI agent to monitor polls in Maricopa and Pima counties in Arizona during its July primary election — a dramatic departure from past DOJ practice of using Civil Rights Division personnel as poll monitors to avoid intimidating voters and local election officials, Democracy Docket reports. The Trump DOJ is apparently planning to continue using prosecutors as poll monitors in the general election, telling Democracy Docket that “department attorneys, including prosecutors, will serve as election monitors.”
In the run-up to election, ICE has begun asking detainees if they have ever voted illegally and, if so, whether in person or by mail, the WaPo reports. “ICE reviews credible allegations of potential criminal activity within its jurisdiction, including allegations related to election integrity,” an ICE spokesperson told the newspaper.
The Big Lie Crazies Still Big Lie-ing
Big Lie purveyor Tina Peters met with President Trump in the Oval Office this week to discuss “election integrity.” Meanwhile, election denier Cleta Mitchell is “pushing a scheme to have Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seize voting machines,” Democracy Docket reports. Former Trump DOJ official Ed Martin helpfully ties all of this together:
Ed Martin says that Tina Peters met with Trump in the Oval Office today to discuss election integrity and “the plans” for the upcoming midterms elections.
A footnote: All of this comes as the Trump DOJ continues to fight to enforce a grand jury subpoena of Fulton County, Georgia, for the names and personal information of the hundreds of staffers, contractors, and volunteers who worked on the 2020 election. Jan. 6 never ends.
How Trump Can Still Subvert the Election
Election law expert Rick Hasen gives a fairly glowing assessment of how well the guardrails have held so far against Trump’s assault on free and fair midterm elections — and assesses where the greatest risks remain.
Another Classic Trump Con
Trump’s claim that he and his super PAC will start paying for the pro-Trump TV ads that the taxpayer funds have been used to air during the stretch run of the midterms does not mean that he will reimburse the government for the expenses it already incurred.
“White House officials clarified on Tuesday to Politico that the president’s post did not mean the PAC would pay for the spots that had already aired,” Politico reports.
More than $10 million of a $20 million DHS contract has already been spent on the ads, the NYT calculates.
Trump DOJ Watch
Emil Bove: Last year, when he was acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove pressed the FBI to illegally investigate ICE protesters in Los Angeles in violation of their constitutional rights and bureau policy, an FBI whistleblower alleges. The allegations emerged in a whistleblower complaint to leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee by Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s LA field office. Fields also claims that FBI Director Kash Patel succumbed to pressure from the White House to investigate another group of ICE protesters after President Trump saw them in TikTok post.
Harmeet Dhillon: After purging career lawyers, the Trump DOJ’s once-prestigous Civil Rights Division — led by Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon — is turning to partisans and conspiracists to fill its depleted ranks, the NYT reports.
David Hearn: Lawyers for David Hearn, the man wrongly accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, sent a letter to the inspectors general of DOJ and DOI asking for an investigation of the circumstances of his arrest and subsequently dismissed prosecution. Among his lawyers is Michael R. Bromwich, a former DOJ IG.
EU Preps for Mass Casualty Russian Attack
In a restricted, closed-door meeting last Wednesday, EU ambassadors discussed how to respond collectively to a hybrid Russian attack that results in mass casualties, a risk they fear looks increasingly likely, Politico reports.
Quote of the Day
“[W]hen a majority of the justices on our highest court show themselves to be consistently indifferent to the growing chasm between law and justice, it is not ‘public rhetoric’ that causes Americans to distrust the Court. It is the Court that surrenders its own legitimacy in the eyes of the public.”—civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill
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Judge Strikes Down Federal Ban on Noncitizen Voting
In a potentially very important ruling last week, a federal judge in south Florida concluded that the Trump administration’s effort to prosecute noncitizen voting relies on a 40-year-old federal statute that is unconstitutional.
In dismissing the prosecution of a Jamaican national for illegally voting in the 2020 election, U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz (a Biden appointee) found 18 U.S.C. § 611, which outlaws voting by noncitizens in federal elections, to be a “voter qualification statute.” As such, Congress intruded on the power of the states to determine voter qualifications by passing the law outlawing noncitizen voting.
“[T]he Constitution does not authorize Congress to legislate voter qualifications for federal elections,” Leibowitz ruled. “Congress has no power to say who can vote or who cannot vote in federal elections—that foundational power is reserved for the States, and limits Congress.”
As Politico’s Kyle Cheney notes, the statute that Judge Leibowitz invalidated underpins several Trump administration noncitizen-voting prosecutions that it ramped up ahead of the midterm elections:
Yet in dozens of other recent cases, announced with great fanfare by the Justice Department — often accompanied by photographs of people being arrested by Homeland Security agents — the administration is hanging its illegal voting crackdown on this very statute. Many are slated for trial in December and January.
Judge Leibowitz was the first judge to ever rule on the constitutionality of the statute. To help reach his decision, Judge Leibowitz had appointed Supreme Court litigator Paul Clement as a friend of the court to advise him on the constitutionality of Congress enacting the 18 U.S.C. § 61.
Given the paucity of noncitizen voting, the broader import of Judge Leibowitz’s ruling is that it undermines the Trump propaganda machine’s focus on noncitizen voting as a catch-all Big Lie that seeks to justify the federal takeover of elections, the imposition of new restrictions on voting, especially mail-in voting, and the delegitimization of elections generally.
Mass Deportation Watch
ProPublica: More than 500 U.S. citizens have been caught up in the Trump administration’s mass deportation dragnet.
TPM’s Hunter Walker: An ICE challenge coin for sale on eBay is emblazoned with the slogan: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man.” It’s not clear whether the coin was officially issued by ICE.
Quote of the Day
“… if Abdul can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere. Anywhere.”—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), in a closed-door fundraiser, on the progressive movement’s “generational” chance to “break the map” of American politics
Will Dems Pull a McConnell on SCOTUS?
Some Senate Democrats are threatening not to confirm any Trump nominees to the Supreme Court for the rest of his term — if they win the Senate majority next month.
Good Read
Jay Willis at Balls & Strikes: The Conservative Takeover of SCOTUSblog Is Just What the Supreme Court Needed
Trump DOJ Watch
U.S. Attorney Scheme: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals quickly scheduled oral arguments for Oct. 23 on whether the president can fire court-appointed U.S. attorneys — a part of his scheme to install loyalists as the top federal prosecutors in blue states. The appeal by the Trump administration comes in the case of Roger Rogoff, the court-appointed U.S. attorney in Seattle, whose firing was ruled unlawful by a federal judge from outside the district. In related news, Rogoff has agreed to staying the lower court order and to not taking office while the appeal is pending.
Jack Smith Report: President Trump and his former co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago documents case are asking the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to delay oral arguments on whether Judge Aileen Cannon’s order permanently sealing Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report should be overturned. In the new filing, attorneys say they need the delay because of scheduling conflicts and because they need time to confer with President Trump. The oral arguments had been rescheduled multiple times over the past several months, most recently for January, but then last week was abruptly moved up to Nov. 2, the day before the midterm elections.
Trump Nixes Politico From Press Pool
The Trump White House barred Politico from boarding Air Force One for a Monday trip to Nebraska, which prevented it from serving in the presidential press pool. The White House similarly retaliated against CNN over the weekend. Along with MS NOW, Politico and CNN previously went to court to overturn a Trump ban on the three outlets from accessing the White House.
Trump Claims He’ll Pay for Pro-Trump Ads
In an apparent reversal, President Trump posted on social media that he and his PAC will pay for the series of four pro-Trump TV ads being aired during the stretch run of midterm election and originally paid for by the federal government.
More than $10 million in taxpayer-funded ads have run since September under a $20 million DHS contract, according to the New York Times.
“It was unclear if the PAC would repay the U.S. government for the money already spent or just pay for ads going forward,” the WSJ reported.
US Feared Drone Attack on Bombers in UK
The abrupt retreat of a dozen B-1 bombers from RAF Fairford to their home base in the U.S. came in response to intel that Iran was planning a sophisticated drone attack on the planes and their crews.
On Guard on NATO’s Eastern Flank
Politico: Lithuanian PM calls for NATO plan to counter Russia’s hybrid attacks
The Global March of the Far Right
Brazil: In once again elevating the Bolsonaro clan in Sunday’s election, Brazil gave the far right its most decisive victory since the country’s military dictatorship ended in 1985, Harvard’s Elizabeth McKenna writes.
Germany: Tobias Rausch of the Alternative for Germany party was elected as president of the parliament in Saxony-Anhalt, the first time since the Nazi era that a far-right politician was elected to lead a state legislature.
The Televangelist Origins of Donald Trump
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker on a hill overlooking their megachurch complex, Heritage USA, in Fort Mill, South Carolina in August 1987. (Photo by Will & Deni McIntyre/Getty Images)
The death of disgraced (is there any other kind?) televangelist Jim Bakker at age 86 lets us dip back in for a moment to the gaudy nouveau riche aesthetics of the mid-1980s out of which came endless TV preacher scandals and ultimately the public persona of Donald Trump.
I used to think that the Trump aesthetic mirrored the Jim Bakkers and the Jimmy Swaggarts because they all peaked in the 1980s, which happened to coincide with the glory days of high-glam primetime soaps, which set an unfortunate standard for opulence. But I’ve come to see Trump as a secular televangelist preaching his own version of the prosperity gospel to the same marks susceptible to the same grift that powered the fleeting televangelical fortunes.
US President Donald Trump and faith leaders pray in the Oval Office at the White House after Trump signed a proclamation calling for a national day of prayer on September 3 for those affected by Hurricane Harvey in Washington, DC, on September 1, 2017. (AFP PHOTO / NICHOLAS KAMM)
Trump’s grift has been bigger and bolder, managing somehow not to have his own soul saved and or to heed a call to follow Jesus, yet being fully embraced by evangelical ministers, often literally in performative Oval Office prayer sessions. Grift knows grift.
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With voting coming to a close four weeks from tomorrow, Morning Memo will be shifting its focus to the midterms, with dual track coverage of the horse race and the outsized expectations for Democrats as an opposition party, if they win.
Setting Expectations
Usually at this point in the election cycle, expectations management is focused on not being so confident that it dampens your voters’ sense of urgency to get to the polls, mutes the post-election news coverage of your victory, and takes the edge off the mandate you win.
But this cycle Democrats are saddled with enormously unrealistic expectations about what they can and should do after the election. Even if they win both chambers of Congress, Democrats even in normal times would face structural, institutional, and political limitations that are very real and will make achieving quick, tangible, meaningful reform virtually impossible.
But these are not normal times.
President Trump has done astonishing damage across all of civic life, in the public and private sectors. He will continue to enjoy the strategic and tactical advantage that comes when you don’t care about collateral damage and when wanton destruction is easier than building enduring institutions.
In addition, many of the ingredients that gave rise to the Trump era remain: a degraded information ecosystem, a fierce right-wing propaganda machine, a nihilistic Republican Party not committed to democracy or to a robust civic life, among many others.
That doesn’t mean the election is not important or that an opposition party can serve no function — but it’s obvious that Democrats will come in shouldering the weight of pressure to move fast and decisively in a system that favors neither. The opposition will also face the unhelpful dichotomy that while the American political system has slid over the edge toward neo-fascism, most of the political press still covers campaigns and elections with the same dated tropes and stale constructs — as if things haven’t fundamentally changed.
It can’t be the case that whether we get democracy or fascism, the rule of law or authoritarianism, reform or systemic corruption rides on the result of each election. Yet, here we are.
Midterm Elections Watch: Senate Edition
NC and KS: The Senate Leadership Fund — the super PAC aligned with the Senate GOP — has paused funding in the North Carolina Senate race and plans to invest $14 million to save Sen. Roger Marshall (R) in Kansas.
Texas: Ken Paxton’s estranged wife can’t bring herself to say his name, but in a new ad urges Republicans to vote for the GOP ticket: “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. In a general election, it’s not as much about the individual players on the team. It’s about getting the whole team across the finish line.”
#TXPol: "I'm Texas Senator Angela Paxton. People have asked my thoughts about this election and turns out, I have some … I'm voting for the Republican ticket on November 3rd."
Texas PAC is up with a new ad featuring Angela Paxton, Ken Paxton's estranged wife. pic.twitter.com/U7yYZ6ZBXp
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee political director Brooke Butler predicts Democrats will carry the House with as many as 240 seats. Democrats have held a House majority that large only once in the last three decades: the high-water mark of 257 seats after the 2008 election.
If Republicans lose the House, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is likely to run for House minority leader, Punchbowl reports: “Jordan won’t admit it publicly, but his inner circle of aides, advisers and friends is plotting for a leadership election, and he’s discussed it with people close to him.”
Midterm Election Shenanigans Watch
The George Election Board’s request for the Trump DOJ to intervene in the state’s voting systems was a rogue act by the board’s executive director, the board chair told Votebeat. More here.
Reuters: How Trump’s obsession with ‘rigged’ voting machines spread across US government
Contrary to earlier reports, election denier Kurt Olsen is still employed at the Justice Department, according to the Washington Post. The newspaper had previously reported that Olsen resigned not just as head of the “grand conspiracy” investigation in south Florida, but from DOJ entirely:
A message Olsen sent Monday announcing his departure was originally misinterpreted by officials in Washington and Miami as a full resignation from the Justice Department, but Olsen later clarified to his bosses that he still intended to remain a department employee, even though he is no longer attached to the case, one of those people said Wednesday. His current assignment remains unclear.
Shock! Trump Behind Pro-Trump Govt Ads
President Trump was directly involved in ordering the use of $20 million in DHS funds to air TV ads in the stretch run of the midterm elections extolling his presidency, the NYT reports:
Mr. Trump was eager to see the laudatory ads on the air and told Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to come up with the money from within the government, the people said. Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s counsel, and Will Scharf, the White House counsel, both said it would be legal to use D.H.S. funds. The president and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, both spoke with Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, about the ads.
Quote of the Day
“My party is being infiltrated by people like Bo French. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi. We’ve got all these people getting on their little podcasts and so forth, saying: ‘We’re just asking questions about the Jews.’”—Karl Rove
Good Read
TPM’s Christopher Mathias: Chris Rufo — Known For ‘DEI’ and ‘CRT’ Panics — Tries to Make ‘the Indian Question’ a Thing
Judge Blocks Border Wall In Big Bend
A federal judge in El Paso on Friday temporarily blocked construction of the border wall in the Big Bend region, including the eponymous national park.
Mass Deportation Watch
Chicago: Marimar Martínez, the woman shot five times by a Border Patrol agent during Operation Midway Blitz, is expected to file a federal lawsuit today “that includes new ballistics analysis and video animation showing the agent was not in harm’s way when he opened fire,” the Chicago Tribune reports.
Maine: DHS agents not only tracked and intimidated people observing ICE activity during Operation Catch of the Day, but allegedly stored information about them in a Palantir-built database, according to newly unsealed court filings reviewed by Wired.
New York: A Hasidic Jew who protested against the Israeli flag may now be deported, the New York Times reports.
NYT: “The United States rushed over the weekend to withdraw all 12 B-1 Air Force bombers from an air base in southern England after commanders received new threats about an Iran-backed plot against the installation, two U.S. officials said on Sunday.”
Dennis Hastert, 1942-2026
WASHINGTON, : US President George W. Bush (L) meets 28 March, 2001 with Republican House and Senate Leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, DC. Bush said he would discuss his tax cut plan and budget at the meeting. With Bush are Speaker of the House Dennis J. Hastert (2nd-L), R-IL, Senator Strom Thurmond (2nd-R), R-SC, and Representative Tom DeLay (R), R-TX. (AFP PHOTO/ Luke FRAZZA)
The longest-serving Republican speaker of the House — who turned out to be, in the words of his sentencing judge, a “serial child molester” — died of natural causes at his Illinois home over the weekend at age 84.
Dennis Hastert served in Congress for 20 years, eight of them as speaker. But it wasn’t until 2015, eight years after he left office, that his abuse decades earlier of wrestlers while he was a wrestling coach emerged. Hastert pleaded guilty to illegally structuring payments to one of his victims and served 13 months in prison.
It remains one of the mysteries of American politics that the Denny Hastert saga — a tragic coda to the corruption of the Tom Delay era — never broke through into the wider political consciousness.
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In a move that smacks of retaliation, Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte is moving to slash next year’s budget for the agency’s inspector general’s office by more than 60% — after it was involved in an earlier investigation of him.
The surprise draconian cuts to the IG’s office would eviscerate its ability to conduct investigations, IG staff told Congress in a letter this week: “We will be forced to reduce staffing by approximately 70-80% in FY 2027, which will result in the discontinuance of essentially all criminal investigations conducted by our Office of Investigations.”
(Senate Democrats sent a letter to Pulte yesterday demanding that he restore funding for the IG’s office and also demanded his resignation.)
The shock budget cuts are just a continuation of a retaliation campaign by Pulte against internal watchdogs that’s been going on for a year.
Pulte, who also serves as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has had an unusually high profile in Trump II for someone in his position, largely because he led the charge to use bogus claims of mortgage fraud to retaliate against Trump foes, like Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Fed Gov. Lisa Cook. With ready access to the president and poster boards often in hand, Pulte offered Trump what he already wanted: a tool of retribution.
Pulte’s mortgage fraud jihad resulted in an internal investigation of Pulte himself over whether he improperly obtained mortgage records of high-profile Democrats officials, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, the Wall Street Journal reported in November:
Fannie’s ethics and investigations group had received internal complaints alleging senior officials had improperly directed staff to access the mortgage documents of James and others, according to the people. The Fannie investigators were probing to find out who had made the orders, whether Pulte had the authority to seek the documents and whether or not they had followed proper procedure, the people said.
That group elevated the probe about the James documents to the more senior Office of Inspector General for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and that Pulte heads, the people said. The acting inspector general then passed the report to the U.S. attorney’s office in eastern Virginia, some of the people said.
To summarize, Fannie Mae investigators found enough of concern to bring in higher-ups at the FHFA IG’s office, which took them seriously enough to forward the concerns to federal prosecutors pursuing James.
“The FHFA acting inspector general sent the office the report at least in part because it could be considered material information for James’s defense in the case, one of the people said,” according to the WSJ.
You already know what happened next: James was indicted for mortgage fraud last October in the Eastern District of Virginia by then-acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan. The indictment was ultimately dismissed by a federal judge because Halligan was unlawfully appointed as U.S. attorney. Subsequent efforts by Halligan to indict James were rejected by two different grand juries.
The fallout from that episode was swift and severe.
Joe Allen, the FHFA acting inspector general who sent the internal investigation to prosecutors, was asked to step down, the WSJ reported. Around the same time, the administration fired about a dozen officials within Fannie Mae’s ethics and internal investigations unit.
The pattern of retaliation is clear. But there’s a more recent wrinkle.
Last week, the WSJ — which you can see has been all over the Pulte story for many months — reported that Pulte hadn’t just targeted Democrats’ mortgages. He’d also examined the mortgages of Todd Blanche!
Blanche and Pulte have been nemeses, for reasons that seem pretty obvious even from the outside looking in. Pulte — a nonlawyer — was stoking Trump’s sense of vengeance with spurious promises of prosecutions that Blanche was stuck with having to try to make happen.
As it was described to WSJ: “Some officials believed Pulte had been trying to collect information on Blanche and others to undermine them and pressure them to more quickly pursue the investigations, the people said.” Pulte denies improperly pulling any internal files.
As if that wasn’t enough, DOJ began its own inquiry into whether Pulte and other officials had “inappropriately shared information about the Justice Department’s investigation into Schiff with those who weren’t authorized to be part of it,” the WSJ reported.
I was immediately intrigued by the anonymous sourcing of the WSJ story. Who would have been in a position to learn that Pulte had targeted Blanche? I came up with two likely candidates: the FHFA IG via Fannie Mae’s investigators and DOJ through its own investigation of the leaks against Schiff.
But that doesn’t mean that the FHFA IG dropped the dime on Pulte to the WSJ. Remember: The FHFA IG already gave the results of its Pulte investigation to DOJ a year ago in the James case. So DOJ was in a position to know in either instance.
Either way, it’s quite a coincidence that a week after that revelation Pulte is taking another retaliatory swing at the FHFA IG and basically trying to put it out of business.
Judge Drives a Stake Thru the Heart of Trump’s US Attorney Scheme
In a major decision that thwarts President Trump’s scheme to appoint loyalist federal prosecutors in blue states, a federal judge ruled that the president cannot fire court-appointed U.S. attorneys.
U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian issued a preliminary injunction restoring the court-appointed Roger Rogoff as U.S. attorney in Seattle. In his order, Bastian concluded:
Allowing the President to fire a court-appointed U.S. Attorney would upend the framework created by the Constitution and the statutory framework, which together balances the President’s right to appoint and the Senate’s right to confirm. Allowing the President to fire a court-appointed U.S. Attorney also eliminates the incentive to nominate a candidate that can be conferred by the Senate—in other words, bypassing the requirement that the Executive and Legislative branches work together to nominate and confirm the U.S. Attorney.
The Trump DOJ quickly moved to appeal the preliminary injunction order.
Judge Orders Inquiry Into DOJ in Broadview 6 Case
U.S. District Judge April Perry has commenced an inquiry in the conduct of the Trump DOJ in the Broadview 6 case. She named University of Chicago law professor William Baude, a former clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, as a friend of the court to take an adversarial position to the Justice Department, since the underlying criminal case has been dismissed and the former defendants cannot play that role.
Good Read
Michael Lewis in WSJ: the Lone Security Guard Who Resisted DOGE
Thread of the Day
The Florida Senate race is competitive enough for the vice president to be campaigning there in person, and spewing racist and xenophobic garbage against the Democratic nominee:
I don't wanna COUCH my words here: I know JD Vance, his eyeliner, and absent Ashley Moody are used to running away from people when things get tough because they care more about themselves and their billionaire buddies than the people they represent. But this is my home. /1
Trump’s Post-Election Plan for Bombing Iran Leaves GOPers Exposed
President Trump’s stated plan to delay the resumption of large-scale bombing of Iran until after the midterms is a not-very-well-concealed effort to protect Republicans up for reelection from the political consequences of the unpopular war.
The size and scale of the bombing campaign planned for late November has forced the Pentagon to begin taking active measures to deploy sufficient manpower and materiel to the Middle East, the WSJ reports:
The USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier deployed from San Diego on Sunday and will be the third carrier strike group in the Middle East when it arrives in late November.
The USS Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group also deployed from California this week, with Marines from the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and will be the second such group in the Middle East when it arrives.
Another way of looking at this is that the threat to resume bombing is a negotiation tactic. The newly deployed forces will eventually relieve existing forces, but their arrival in theater means for a time they U.S will have a particularly robust force with which to either carry out renewed bombing or present a credible threat to do so.
Judge Demands OLC Memo on Boat Strikes
In a ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of Manhattan ordered the Trump administration to provide him with the Office of Legal Counsel memo that provides the legal justification for the lawless high seas campaign of strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats.
The order comes in a lawsuit brought by legal groups to enforce their FOIA request for the memo, which the administration is fighting against releasing publicly.
Noting the irony of the administration touting the memo to justify its conduct while refusing to release it, Judge Engelmayer wrote: “The agency defendants cannot claim surprise from this consequence of the Executive Branch’s repeated public statements embracing the OLC Memo—and it only—as setting out the legal parameters for the boat strikes.”
See You Back Here Monday
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Under the pretext of an ethics complaint against all but one of the active federal judges in Minnesota, Attorney General Todd Blanche signaled yesterday that not only will the Trump administration continue to run roughshod over the judicial branch but that judges had better shut up about it.
The complaint filed by second and third highest ranking DOJ officials with the uber-right-wing 8th Circuit Court of Appeals is ostensibly about an admittedly unusual decision by the federal judges who bore the brunt of Operation Metro Surge to sit for an interview with the New York Times for a story that ran Sept. 17.
In the interview, the judges — including Patrick Schiltz who was the chief judge during the peak of the flood of mass deportation cases swamping the Minnesota federal court — defended the rule of law, provided a civics lesson on the role of the courts, and described the structural and institutional challenges they had faced. They refrained from talking about individual cases, but they did speak in broad terms about the habeas cases in general, Operation Metro Surge and the conduct of the Trump DOJ.
The complaint — signed by acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter and Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward — accused the judges of pandering to the press and engaging in unethical behavior that “flagrantly violated” the canons of judicial ethics. It specifically called out Judge Schiltz and Judge John R. Tunheim — who were both quoted by name in the NYT article — for what it called “particularly egregious” misconduct.
The Trump DOJ asked the 8th Circuit to appoint a special committee to conduct an investigation of the judges for their allegedly improper behavior and to order Judges Schiltz and Tunheim to recuse themselves from any cases involving DHS.
Blanche: "Today, we're also announcing that just a few minutes ago the DOJ filed a judicial misconduct complaint with the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals against all but one district court judge in the District of Minnesota for violating various judicial canons."
The Trump DOJ getting on its high horse about legal ethics is a lot to take on its own. But it’s also striking that the complaint leans into what DOJ officials see as a friendly audience on the 8th Circuit. It emphasizes, for instance, the appeals court’s own decision upholding the Trump administration’s mass detention policy without bond — one of only two appeals courts to do so — in which it overruled the Minnesota judges.
Traditionally, Article III judges have been free to speak publicly on matters of judicial administration, the Constitution, democracy — civics, if you will. They have been free to lobby for more funding, better security protection, restructuring of the judiciary, and reform measures without running afoul of ethics requirements.
But the Trump DOJ — which has defied orders left and right, hidden its worst conduct behind unprepared junior lawyers, botched cases, fired huge numbers of experienced attorneys, and made a hash of the distinguished department — now wants to clamp down on the ability of judges to stand up against what may be the most sustained assault on the judiciary in the nation’s history.
SCOTUS Takes Up Mass Detentions
As expected, the Supreme Court will take up the Trump administration’s policy of mass detention without bond that the circuit courts have split on, but which dozens of judges in thousands of cases have found to be unlawful.
Renee Good’s Family Sues
The family of Renee Good who was shot and killed by ICE in January during Operation Metro Surge has filed two civil lawsuits against the Trump administration arising from her death.
Broadview Six Hearing This Afternoon
A federal judge in Chicago this afternoon will hear arguments over whether to conduct a further inqury into alleged misconduct into Trump’s DOJ’s handling of the grand jury in the Broadview Six case and the aftermath of that now-abandoned prosecution of ICE protesters.
As Bad as It Gets
The Supreme Court’s prior handling of the third-country removal case was already the most troublesome emergency docket case, Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck argues, then came this week’s unexplained decision in the case:
“There have certainly been rulings on the emergency docket that I believe to be more clearly and obviously wrong on the merits. And there have been rulings on the emergency docket that have produced even more harmful effects domestically and/or to the separation of powers. But there’s something profoundly ugly about the D.V.D. case that, unfortunately, was on display again on Tuesday.”
Cannon Wiggles Out of Bind
Give her credit: Judge Aileen Cannon has gotten out of the pickle she was in on Volume II of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report. She struck a motion from FBI agents who investigated the Mar-a-Lago documents case and are now being targeted by the Trump DOJ seeking clarification on her order sealing Volume II. Her reason: The lawyers had failed to confer with the co-defendants in the underlying criminal case about their motion before filing it.
808
PAPERLESS ORDER striking for lack of conferral806Motion to Intervene and Seek Clarification of Court Order. S.D. Fla. L.R. 88.9(a). Signed by Judge Aileen M. Cannon on 10/1/2026. (sm1) (Entered: 10/01/2026)
11th Circuit Stirs to Action
In the Volume II case which is on appeal, the 11th Circuit the appeals court rescheduled oral arguments yet again but moved them earlier for the first time after months of kicking the can down the road. Instead of January of next year they’re now scheduled for the first week of November. Nothing much going on that week.
Reflecting Pool Case Dismissed With Prejudice
Ruling that “no crime occurred,” a DC judge has ruled that the already-dismissed Reflecting Pool case against David Hearn should be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the Trump DOJ can’t bring the case against him again in the future.
Quote of the Day
“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era. There is no precedent.”—Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, on last night’s horrific attempted execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee.
Pike remains hospitalized this morning. Gov. Bill Lee (R) has halted executions through the end of the year.
In the defining legal struggle of our time — whether the federal judiciary will sustain the rule of law long enough to preserve the essential core of a democracy for us to repair, rebuild, and re-enlarge after Trump II — the jury is still out.
Important developments in three different cases yesterday — the Alien Enemies Act, third-country deportations, and Trump’s collusive settlement with the IRS — point in very different directions.
On the face of it, not much unites the cases or offers a common theme or collective takeaway. But in stepping back and reviewing the last 20 months of Trump II legal battles, yesterday’s developments are datapoints in favor of a tentative working theory that appeals courts are slowly coming around to the urgency of the current moment.
In the first six months of Trump II, district judges were on their heels, caught off guard by the ferocity of the rampage against the rule of law and still tethered to old norms and expectations for the Justice Department that no longer held true. It was a brutal stretch of watching the Trump administration seize some key early wins and capture important legal ground.
After being collectively kicked in the teeth, district judges pretty quickly adjusted to the new reality — but appeals courts failed to back district judges in key respects, missed the urgency of the moment, and surrendered more ground to the lawlessness.
More recently, appellate judges have begun to turn, too. Two glimmers of hope yesterday came at the appeals court level, with the en banc D.C. Circuit looking poised to allow U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to resume his contempt of court inquiry in the original Alien Enemies Act case and the 11th Circuit handing Trump a loss in his bogus settlement with the IRS.
That still leaves the Supreme Court, which — with a few notable exceptions — has been Trump’s greatest enabler. It played true to form yesterday with an emergency intervention that will allow the administration’s brutal third-country removals policy to continue past the election and until it rules after oral arguments in December.
Unlike the lower courts, the Supreme Court will not eventually come around. While we’ve already seen examples — most prominently on tariffs, birthright citizenship, and the USPS mail-in ballots rule — of the Roberts Court refusing to endorse some of Trump’s worst excesses, the high court is too deeply compromised and its six-justice right-wing majority too invested in the GOP’s partisan fate to emerge as a reliable bulwark.
But the appeals courts may buy us some additional time by slowing the speed of the descent.
A quick rundown on yesterday’s developments, in turn:
AEA Contempt Inquiry Likely to Resume
The 7-4 Democratic-Republican split on the en banc D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals already boded well for the prospect of Judge Boasberg being able to resume his inquiry into whether Trump administration officials, including DOJ lawyers, should be held in contempt of court for violating his orders to stop and turn around deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act.
Oral arguments left the strong impression that a majority of the full court will greenlight Boasberg’s inquiry. I’d pay particular attention to Judge Karen Henderson, a Bush I appointee who authored an important ruling on the substance of the Alien Enemies Act last year in the same case.
For more, I wrote at some length about yesterday’s oral arguments here.
Trump Takes a Loss in IRS Case
A unanimous three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit declined to put on hold the sanctions order by U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams in Trump’s collusive lawsuit against the IRS.
The ruling was made on procedural grounds, including that the appeal was premature given Williams hadn’t yet decided on the amount of attorney fees award in the case. But while the appeals court panel — two Obama appointees and one Trump appointee — didn’t reach the merits of Williams’ ruling it did conclude: “Given the record before us, the appellants have not made a strong showing that the district court committed clear error in its collusion and bad faith findings.”
Roberts Courts Does It Again
The Supreme Court intervened on an emergency basis to block lower court orders that had effectively frozen the Trump administration policy of deporting people without notice or hearing to countries they are not from and to which they have no connection.
The three Democratic appointees opposed granting the stay.
The decision by a federal court in Boston, and upheld by the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, had required giving detainees a chance to voice fear of torture or persecution before being deported to third countries. Now the third-country deportations can resume with abandon.
In what legal experts called an unusual twist, the Supreme Court identified three questions it wants briefed in the case, then gave the Trump administration the chance to identify any other issues it wants addressed: “Such other questions that the Government determines are appropriate for the proper disposition of the case.”
The court fast-tracked oral arguments for December.
Victim of ICE Shooting Charged in Texas
Wilber Rafael Garcés Perez, the Venezuelan national shot by an ICE agent in Austin, Texas 10 days ago, has been charged with assaulting a federal officer during their initial encounter.
Garcés Perez, who was shot in the shoulder and still has a bullet in his back, allegedly hit the ICE agent with his vehicle’s side mirror as he fled the initial traffic stop. That portion of the incident is caught on the body cam of one of the officers, according to a court filing.
Two observations about the filings:
The shooting came a few moments later, after an alleged high-speed chase, when only one officer — without a body cam running — was present.
In the court filing, a Homeland Security Investigations agent said he interviewed Garces Perez and the non-shooting agent after the incident, but gave no indication that he had interviewed the agent who fired his gun.
Stay tuned …
Swimming in Schadenfreude
The only proper way to cover the trio of Jack Smith hearings before Congress over the past year is as perjury trap under a veneer of disinformation — which is what made Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) getting snared in his own perjury trap such a feast of mockery and memes.
If you still haven’t gotten enough:
TPM’s Hunter Walker: New Evidence Shows Just How Badly One Republican Senator Beclowned Himself in the Jack Smith Hearing
TPM’s John Light: 5 Points About a Senator’s Disastrous But Hilarious Attempt to Accuse Jack Smith of Perjury
The full exchange:
CBP Funds Used for Pro-Trump TV Ads
The federal funds used to pay for pro-Trump TV ads airing in the stretch run of the midterm elections came from Customs and Border Protection, the WSJ reports. Outside monitors estimate some $1.4 million has been spent on the ads that have aired so far, but Democratic lawmakers claim allege that $20 million of CBP money has been shifted to the ad campaign.
Pete Hegseth Watch
Two important and deeply corrosive moves by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to politicize the military and erode its professionalism:
Hegseth is expected to announce today that he is cutting the number of flag officers by at least 20%. As with other Trump administration purges, the initial purge is usually only half of the equation. It’s who ultimately gets elevated in their place that cements the role of loyalists, hacks, and charlatans.
After more than two decades of unimaginable human carnage and sunk costs in toil and treasure, the last remaining U.S. forces in Iraq are departing the country today.
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The mother of all “investigate the investigators” retributions in south Florida suffered another major blow with the resignation of Kurt Olsen as its top prosecutor.
Olsen’s departure marks the third top prosecutor in a row to leave the probe — though Olsen’s departure seems markedly different.
A career prosecutor, Maria Medetis Long, left under duress in April, concerned that the case lacked evidence to proceed.
Then Joseph diGenova — a Trump true believer — resigned under pressure earlier this month for not seeking indictments fast enough for Main Justice and the White House.
Olsen, who took over after diGenova left, is even more of a true believer. He had worked on bogus election fraud cases while on the Trump II White House staff and had no prior prosecution experience before being assigned to the “grand conspiracy” case.
And now he’s gone. Not just from the investigation, but from DOJ entirely.
Olsen was also reportedly under pressure to produce indictments quickly, but he seems to have been undone by unspecified “issues with his security clearance” — a guffaw-worthy irony considering classified documents are at the center of the retributive investigation.
Olsen’s supposed probe — predicated on the nonsense notion that Trump was the victim of a Deep State plot to deprive him of his civil rights — is especially focused on the indictment of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, so problems with his security clearance is a plot twist too implausible for a screenplay. Olsen’s resignation comes after FBI agents who investigated the Mar-a-Lago case were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury overseen by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — a development which spilled out into the open just last week.
This may turn out to be an important side plot: Olsen was working in the White House for most of the past two years and then led a deeply politicized investigation without precedent while having some sort of issue with his security clearance. It’s a pattern we’ve seen across both Trump presidencies: administration figures with trouble securing security clearances. It’s not clear if we’ll ever know the scope and scale of the issue Olsen had or the risk, if any, that he presented.
Where does that leave the “investigate the investigators” probe that is trying to sweep up Trump foes from John Brennan to James Comey to Jack Smith and puts at risk every other investigator and prosecutor involved in the Trump prosecutions?
It’s super unclear because there’s no real precedent for this kind of probe or this kind of DOJ flailing or this kind of White House pressure to produce specific results in a case regardless of the facts or the law.
At one level, Attorney General Todd Blanche has shown a tendency to overpromise and underdeliver to President Trump on this case. It seems to have led, at least in part, to the firing of Pam Bondi as attorney general. It was among the cases that Blanche pushed forward while auditioning as acting attorney general. He’s shuffled the deck twice now as attorney general, presumably as a way to buy himself more time with an impatient and impulsive president.
In other Trump II cases, we’ve seen political appointees at Main Justice jump into the breach and handles cases directly themselves. Perhaps that’s the next step here. But at some point, Blanche is going to run out of people to point the finger at for not pursuing this case zealously enough — and Trump may point the finger at him.
Kash Patel’s Minder Resigns
FBI co-deputy director Andrew Bailey — the former Missouri attorney general who was brought in to form an unprecedented triumvirate leadership structure at the bureau, with the possibility dangled of him succeeding Director Kash Patel — has stepped down.
The official reason for Bailey’s departure: to spend more time with his family.
The actual reason? There are conflicting reports, as they say. Or perhaps better to call them multiple contributing factors:
My personal fave, via CBS News (emphasis mine): “Patel consistently kept Bailey at arm’s length and cut him out of meetings the deputy FBI director should attend because Bailey was constantly flagging things that were unconstitutional.”
Another factor, via MS NOW, which the FBI quickly denied publicly: Bailey was “annoyed” by the recent demotions of two senior counterterrorism agents in the FBI Washington field office over dissatisfaction with their handling of harassing phone calls made to Katie Miller, the wife of White House official Stephen Miller.
The mundane D.C. reason: Bailey was frustrated at not being named FBI director as Patel flailed in the role.
Take your pick. All of the above might be the smartest bet.
Trump DOJ Watch
Retribution Alert: Former Special Counsel Jack Smith is set to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today — his third time testifying to Congress in the past year — as part of Republican lawmakers’ attempt to set a perjury trap for him. They’ve already referred him to the Trump DOJ for criminal prosecution once, as they try to rewrite the history of Trump’s own criminality.
Should I Stay or Should I Go? The New Yorker has a well-balanced piece that genuinely grapples with the tough choices and real tradeoffs between remaining at the Trump DOJ or resigning in protest. “The D.O.J. left me,” Samantha Trepel, a former prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division, said. “I didn’t leave the D.O.J.”
For Your Radar …
For those keeping close track of the major legal cases still slowly making their way through the courts …
Alien Enemies Act: The full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing oral arguments this morning on whether U.S. District Judge James Boasberg can proceed with a contempt of court inquiry into the Trump administration’s violation of his orders to stop deportation flights and turn planes around. This full court is involved after a three-judge panel of the court blocked Boasberg from proceeding.
Abrego Garcia: At the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Trump administration filed its appeal brief overnight in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s habeas case (which is distinct from his case to bring back from El Salvador and his criminal case).
Trump IRS lawsuit: At the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Trump DOJ filed its appeal brief challenging the imposition of sanctions in the collusive lawsuit by President Trump against the IRS that produced the “anti-weaponization” slush fund and IRS immunity for Trump.
SCOTUS Gets Trans Care in Prisons Case
The Trump DOJ has asked the Supreme Court to pause while on appeal a lower court order that blocked a new Bureau of Prisons policy ending the provision of gender-affirming care in federal prisons.
Trump Behind Govt’s Pro-Trump Ads
CNN: “President Trump has personally driven the controversial, taxpayer-funded video ads promoting himself and his administration’s policies, including helping select the imagery and videos used, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.”
Mass Deportation Watch
“ICE is now detaining more immigrants than ever before,” The Guardian reports.
The ICE agent who shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston in July has been identified by the Texas Tribune.
The Department of Homeland Security rejected a request from the NFL to take down a mashup video of highlights of Hall of Fame safety Brian Dawkins’ career that it posted in support of its mass deportation operation. Neither the league, Dawkins, nor the Philadelphia Eagles (for whom he played from 1996-2008) gave permission for the use of the video clips or of his name and likeness.
Quote of the Day
“These last two years have been just a cesspool of coercion. I’m not prepared to say that I know that there’s illegal activity here that will result in the revocation of contracts, but I do know that there’s all kinds of dirty conflicts of interest here.”—Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), in line to chair the House Intelligence Committee if Democrats win in November, firing a warning shot to intel industry contractors
UK Suspects Released
The five British nationals arrested on suspicion of terrorism, near a Royal Air Force Base used by the U.S. Air Force for operations against Iran, were released on bail.
Makes Me Want to Weep
WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 27: An aerial view of the White House as crews continue to repair grass on the South Lawn where Freedom 250’s Ultimate Fighting Championship temporary stadium was built on June 27, 2026 in Washington, DC. The UFC has reportedly allocated $700,000 to completely replace and restore the White House South Lawn grass following the fighting event. (Photo by Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images)
A WaPo visualization of President Trump’s unilateral, personalist, ahistorical, and aesthetically gross remaking of monumental D.C.
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The Trump administration was found in contempt of court Friday for wrongfully deporting a young Salvadoran man last month for the second time — after he had already been unlawfully deported in March, then returned to the U.S., before being removed again.
U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher ruled that the administration’s conduct violated three separate orders that she had issued in the long-running class action settlement involving unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in the United States. The case has been a flash point for Trump administration defiance of court orders, with some 100 asylum seekers having been wrongfully deported in violation of the settlement agreement approved by Gallagher.
For the past four weeks, the administration and class counsel were in a standoff. The administration conceded the removal was in error and was prepared to return the young man — referred to in court only as “E.L.A.” — to the United States. But it was opposed to demands by his lawyers that he be released upon his return and not deported again until his asylum application was heard.
Gallagher’s opinion finding the administration in contempt remains under seal for now, but her order was made public. She granted some, but not all, of the conditions for the return of E.L.A. that his lawyers had been seeking. She ordered the administration to:
return E.L.A. to the United States, with three days notice to him and his lawyers of his time and place of arrival;
not remove him again until it fully adjudicates his asylum application;
provide five business days notice to him and lawyers if it intends to remove him again for any reason;
return to E.L.A. all of his personal property and documents that were removed from him at the time of his wrongful deportation.
Gallagher did not order E.L.A. released from custody upon his return, as his lawyers had sought.
Gallagher’s order makes no mention of sanctions against the government for its contempt, but in fairness E.L.A.’s lawyers have not sought sanctions yet, focusing in the immediate aftermath of his second deportation on getting him back to the United States and not immediately deported a third time. Gallagher previously found the administration in contempt in July in a different aspect of the same case.
READ: Mecklenburg Resignation Letter
Sheri Mecklenburg, the federal prosecutor implicated in the mishandling of the Broadview Six grand jury who stepped down last week to defend herself, penned a blistering resignation letter to U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros. In it, she blames him for pursuing felony charges against ICE protestors over her recommendation that they be charged with misdemeanors, a claim the Trump DOJ later denied.
A key hearing into the Trump DOJ misconduct in the case is set for Thursday.
The Purges: FBI Edition
Michael Burgwald, the head of the FBI Washington Field Office’s counterterrorism division, and his deputy, Courtland Rae, were demoted Friday due to dissatisfaction with their investigation of allegedly threatening phone calls made to MAGA podcaster Katie Miller, the wife of White House aide Stephen Miller, Bloomberg reports.
“The orders from the bureau’s DC chief Darren Cox stemmed from frustration shared by the Miller family that the field office was moving slowly in probing allegedly harassing phone messages,” according to the report.
The White House denied involvement in the removals. Cox said the decision was his, not FBI Director Kash Patel’s, but Patel reportedly “was also displeased with the office’s progress on the case.”
Quote of the Day
“I told them until they perp-walk a doctor, the job is not done.”—Chad Mizelle, the onetime chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, bragging to the WSJ about targeting providers of gender-affirming care for minors
All You Need to Know
If there was any doubt that last week’s pro-Trump TV ad paid for by the U.S. government was in fact an undisguised campaign ad ahead of the midterm elections, the administration took pains to remove that doubt by also running a TV ad straight from his 2024 campaign:
NEW: The Trump admin is airing *another* taxpayer-funded political ad, & this time, it's from his 2024 campaign.
Trump says in the ad: "We will demolish the deep state, expel the warmongers from our government… We will rout the fake news media…" pic.twitter.com/4QtL4JUbG6
allowed the Trump administration to use data from the Social Security Administration to verify people’s citizenship status (though only on a limited basis for this election);
rejected yet another attempt to use a GOP friendly congressional district map in Missouri.
After winning in court to get its White House credentials back, CNN was barred from Air Force One on Saturday.
AI-pocalypse Now
Axios: Top AI companies probing tens of thousands of security incidents
New York Times: OpenAI agents meddled with the websites for the SEC and the Education and Commerce departments this summer without the AI company’s knowledge.
Washington Post: How the U.S. and Russia weakened safeguards — including stripping human oversight — in a landmark UN pact on AI weapons.
Suspected Terror Plot in the UK
Five UK nationals were arrested Sunday on suspicion of terrorism outside of a Royal Air Force base used by the U.S. Air Force to conduct operations against Iran. The five men were all in their 20s. A bomb disposal team was reportedly on site and several dozen homes in the area were evacuated.
Fantastic Read
Presentation of credentials by the new ambassadors of the USA, Kimberly Ann Guilfoyle, to President of Hellenic Republic Konstantinos Tasoulas at Presidential Palace in Athens, Greece on November 4, 2025. (Photo by Menelaos Myrillas / SOOC via AFP) (Photo by MENELAOS MYRILLAS/SOOC/AFP via Getty Images)
An enthralling and well-reported piece from the Wall Street Journal on the mystery man who keeps popping up with Kimberly Guilfoyle — the former Fox anchor, one-time fiancée of Don Jr., and now U.S. ambassador to Greece — as she wheels and deals across Europe.
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