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

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

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

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

Federal prosecutors have moved to dismiss criminal charges against former U.S. Olympian David Hearn after concluding that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by a flawed renovation rather than vandalism.

The Justice Department filed a motion Friday asking a federal judge to dismiss the felony case, acknowledging that peeling and deterioration at the recently renovated pool stemmed from “flawed installation by the contractor” and not from Hearn’s actions. The reversal follows the discovery of Interior Department records showing the project had experienced significant installation problems before Hearn was accused of damaging the site.

Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, was charged last month after surveillance footage showed him stopping at the Reflecting Pool and touching sections of the blue liner that had begun peeling away. Prosecutors initially alleged he intentionally damaged the newly renovated surface, a felony offense carrying a potential prison sentence.

According to court filings, however, federal prosecutors later learned that contractor records documented widespread failures in the installation process. The Justice Department also said key information about the renovation problems was not provided before the indictment was returned.

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The Reflecting Pool renovation became a high-profile project after the Trump administration ordered a makeover ahead of the America 250 celebrations. Soon after reopening, however, visitors documented algae blooms, bubbling surfaces and peeling liner, prompting questions about the quality of the work.

Hearn has maintained that he merely touched material that was already separating from the surface and did not cause any damage. His attorneys have called on the government to apologize, arguing he was wrongfully prosecuted based on incomplete information.

Hours after the charges were dropped, Trump disputed the Justice Department’s conclusion in a Truth Social post, writing that “vandals” were responsible for the damage and criticizing prosecutors for abandoning the case. Federal prosecutors, however, cited newly obtained Interior Department records and additional evidence in concluding the damage was caused by problems with the Reflecting Pool’s installation rather than Hearn’s actions.

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Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, promises Americans that he has no intention of going forward with a $1.8 billion slush fund designed to funnel money out of the Treasury and into the pockets of right-wing attorneys. The outcry that followed the Justice Department’s May 19 announcement of the fund, which would pay the legal bills of political allies charged with crimes ranging from fraud to storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, was deafening. In addition to blowback from many congressional Republicans, a federal judge halted the administration’s disbursement of the money, which was created as part of Trump’s agreement with the federal government stemming from his lawsuit  for the leak of his tax returns. Blanche, in his role as acting attorney general, claimed the administration would voluntarily walk away from using the money.

Now, months later, he has resolutely avoided putting this promise in writing, and his failure to formally give up the slush fund is putting at risk his Senate confirmation to permanently head the Justice Department.

The reason behind Blanche’s refusal is obvious: He and Trump want to keep the option to re-open the fund at a later date, along with the ability to write fat checks, paid for with taxpayer money, to the lawyers working on behalf of unsavory right-wing figures.

Blanche knows that world quite well; he has become personally wealthy doing exactly this kind of work. Before taking his job at the Justice Department, first as Pam Bondi’s deputy attorney general, and then as her replacement, Blanche was making millions representing Trump in everything from a civil rape case to criminal fraud. Blanche also knows how such funds pay for that type of work. According to ABC News, between March 2023 and December 2024, his law firm was paid almost $10 million, not by Trump personally, but by a political action committee that was supposed to be funding Republican campaigns. 

Blanche’s nomination is imperiled by his refusal to let go of the chance to flood the coffers of right-wing lawyers defending shady characters like his former client and current boss. Thursday’s vote to approve his nomination by the Senate Judiciary Committee was delayed. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex. and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., both who are leaving the Senate at the end of the year, are threatening to vote no unless Blanche formally commits to rolling back the deal that created this slush fund and also gave Trump and his family eternal immunity from IRS audits.

“This is not popular,” Tillis told the New York Times. “It is killing some of our candidates because they can’t explain it. And now it looks like they weren’t being honest when they said it was inoperative.”

It’s not just a “looks like” issue. Anyone who said the fund was inoperative because of Blanche’s informal say-so is either ignorant or lying. As the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote in June, Blanche and Trump remain committed to funding a “pipeline of taxpayer-funded payouts to political allies and convicted criminals.” Even the conservative National Review’s Andrew McCarthy agrees, writing on Wednesday that “Blanche has resisted memorializing in writing his claim that the fund is kaput, because President Trump wants the fund.”

The White House has already been funneling taxpayer funds to these bad actors through a slightly different but related process. As the Washington Post reported in June, the Justice Department has paid out millions to Trump allies who claim victimization because they were investigated or even convicted of crimes. The family of Ashli Babbitt got a nearly $5 million check over baseless claims that her shooting death during the Jan. 6 riot was unwarranted, even though video footage clearly showed her climbing through a window in an apparent attempt to chase down congressional members and staff fleeing in fear. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported on a seven-figure check written to Paul Vaughn, who was convicted of a federal crime in 2024 for conspiring to blockade an abortion clinic before being pardoned by Trump last year. 

Vaughn’s legal representation by the Thomas More Society is a reminder of who really benefits if Blanche and Trump succeed in reviving the fund after the midterm elections: right-wing lawyers, who started licking their lips within moments of the Justice Department’s announcement. 

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“Everybody’s very excited about it,” Mark McCloskey, a lawyer representing Jan. 6 defendants, told the Washington Post. Even though his clients have been pardoned by Trump, he has been lobbying for the fund, hoping to see a big payday by claiming wrongful prosecution. Such a claim would be all but certain to fall apart in a court of law. But as the existing track record shows, the goal is to get the Justice Department to “settle” these claims by writing checks to people who otherwise wouldn’t see a dime. Clients would get money, but so would the lawyers — especially those who, like McCloskey, would get a cut of check after check. 

At this point, it’s unclear if Blanche would be able to personally benefit from various schemes to pay off Trump’s political allies with government money. He could return to private practice and start taking on those kinds of clients after leaving the Justice Department. By then, though, it’s possible a Democrat will be in the White House again, and will have either shut down the fund or started blocking payments for phony claims made by right-wing operatives. But, as someone who was on a similar gravy train not that long ago, Blanche knows full well how rich his fellow right-wing lawyers could get from this. 

And it’s not just private practice lawyers, either. Groups like the Thomas More Society, Alliance Defending Freedom and other far-right legal nonprofits need funding for their legal crusades, as seen by the lawsuit that overturned Roe v. Wade, or the ongoing cases meant to curtail voting rights or LGBTQ+ equality. Taking on right-wing clients with baseless claims of victimization could be an easy way to get money, which could then be used to fund cases attacking reproductive rights or religious freedom. 

That Cornyn and Tillis are taking this stand is surprising. The pair have a long history of supporting the right-wing legal organizations that could find themselves flush with slush money. As Tillis’s comments about the midterm campaigns show, it may not be anything deeper than a sense that this is politically toxic. Trump’s consideration of withdrawing Blanche’s nomination would be nothing more than a pause until after the midterm elections, when he is banking on new Republican senators to replace Cornyn and Tillis — and put his payola scheme back into action.

It may not even come to that. On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., was assuring reporters that Blanche’s nomination would be back as soon as next week, after “a resolution on the issues that Senators Cornyn and Tillis raised.” Thune’s comments suggest that as long as Trump does a slightly better job at deflecting attention from the fund, the two senators can claim victory and give Blanche their support. 

Or perhaps this will really be the moment that Republicans, two of them at least, stand up to Trump for real, instead of just doing so as quickly-dispatched political theater. If so, it’s a hopeful sign that Republicans can read a poll and see his corruption is starting to wear thin, especially for a public struggling to make ends meet while the president enriches himself and his cronies. 

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This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.

From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.

Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.

From the Epstein files to gun rights to immigration enforcement, senior Justice Department officials keep running to Fox News to freelance policy and signal loyalty to Donald Trump. But in the process, they are also riling up the MAGA coalition. Each media appearance creates a new mess that career lawyers then have to clean up. At this point, the most responsible thing Attorney General Pam Bondi could do is confiscate the department’s television remotes and log everyone out of their social media accounts. But restraint has never been the MAGA brand.

Consider Jeanine Pirro, the former co-host of “The Five” on Fox News before she was confirmed as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Pirro recently returned to her old network and vowed to arrest gun owners who bring firearms into the District, even if they are licensed elsewhere. “You bring a gun into the District, you mark my words, you’re going to jail,” she told Fox’s Martha MacCallum on Monday. “I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.”

The reaction was swift and furious on the right.

“What is Pirro talking about here, and why is a Fox anchor cheering her on?” asked conservative firearms reporter Stephen Gutowski. The National Association for Gun Rights decried Pirro’s warning as “unacceptable and intolerable comments by a sitting US attorney.” Right-wing gun hero Kyle Rittenhouse concluded that “Pirro should be fired.” 

The U.S. attorney’s stance also angered several Republican members of Congress.

“I bring a gun into the district every week… I have a license in Florida and DC to carry. And I will continue to carry to protect myself and others. Come and Take it!” Florida Republican Rep. Greg Stuebe said. “Second Amendment rights are not extinguished just because an American visits DC,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis posted on X.

Pirro eventually tried to clean up the mess on X, clarifying that D.C. law requires firearms to be licensed locally and that her office is focused on unlawful carrying. But the damage was done. A senior federal prosecutor had used a Fox News appearance to issue what sounded like a blanket threat to gun owners, contradicting both conservative orthodoxy and the administration’s own efforts to promote permitless carry and national reciprocity. 

The Fox News habit shows up again in the handling of the Epstein files, where senior officials seem desperate to minimize embarrassment to the powerful. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, went on the network this week to reassure viewers that partying with Jeffrey Epstein “is not a crime.” He offered this absolution in the context of revelations that CBS News’ new hire Peter Attia, a health and wellness influencer, appears more than 1,700 times in newly released Epstein documents. 

The Epstein files were supposed to be Trump’s transparency moment, a chance to finally reveal what powerful men knew about a serial sexual predator. Instead the president echoed Blanche’s sentiment from the Oval Office, declaring that it was “really time” for the country to move past Epstein. Podcast host Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, dutifully dismissed the files as a “Democrat hoax.” FBI Director Kash Patel went even further, going on Fox News’ “Special Report” this week to declare that he was done with the Epstein matter entirely. This coordinated shrug comes as Trump’s inner circle keeps popping up in Epstein-adjacent reporting.

Meanwhile, Bondi’s Justice Department is hemorrhaging prosecutors, and nowhere is the crisis more visible than in Minnesota. The state’s U.S. Attorney’s office has been decimated, shrinking from 70 assistant federal prosecutors under Biden to as few as 17 now. The four prosecutors who spearheaded the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud case all resigned within days of each other, joining more than a dozen others in resigning rather than defending an immigration enforcement campaign so aggressive and sloppy that federal judges are openly threatening contempt citations on a near-routine basis. 

The breaking point for many was the department’s refusal to open a civil rights investigation into the January killings of U.S. citizens Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, who were fatally shot by federal immigration agents. Prosecutors raised alarms internally about the administration’s efforts to block state and local authorities from investigating the shootings as potential homicides, as well as about orders to rush through charges against defendants accused of assaulting federal officers without full investigations. One retiring attorney described it plainly: “This was the ultimate example of selective prosecution.”

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More than 300 former Justice Department attorneys have now urged Bondi to allow local investigators to do their jobs, warning that blocking state and local probes into possible violations of state law “poses a threat to the rule of law.”

While prosecutors are drowning in habeas corpus petitions and judges are losing patience, Bondi herself is finding time to go on Fox News and threaten journalists. Discussing the recent arrest of Don Lemon, who was charged with federal civil rights violations for entering an evangelical church in St. Paul to report on an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest, Bondi did not hedge or walk anything back. “We’re going to prosecute you, and you will be held accountable,” she said on “Hannity” this week. “Doesn’t matter if you’re a failed journalist with a camera in your hand, you can’t do it.” 

Chad Mizelle, a former top DOJ official, took to X to openly solicit “pro-Trump” lawyers for assistant U.S. attorney positions, asking applicants to support Trump’s “anti-crime agenda.” Stephen Miller amplified the call, declaring that “patriots” were needed. Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami, shared Mizelle’s post with his own message: “We are hiring!” 

These messages amount to a public declaration that loyalty to Trump is now a hiring criterion for federal prosecutors. For her part, Bondi has just hired a new chief of staff after leaving the position vacant since September, but no staffing shuffle can solve a leadership problem this fundamental. 

The move triggered alarm even among conservatives, with the National Review warning about politicized prosecution. Andy McCarthy, a writer for the magazine and a Fox News contributor, said the Justice Department should be defunded if support for the incumbent president is a condition of enforcing the law. The department “should only exist if it’s nonpartisan,” the former federal prosecutor wrote, warning it would be “too dangerous to liberty otherwise.” Commentary editor and National Review contributor John Podhoretz agreed. 

The brain drain has been catastrophic at the department, which is engulfed in personnel chaos. Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump personal attorney with no prosecutorial experience, washed out of the Eastern District of Virginia after failing to deliver cases against Trump’s enemies and “masquerading” as a U.S. attorney, in the words of a federal judge. Alina Habba met a similar fate in New Jersey, disqualified after courts ruled she was unlawfully serving. Ed Martin, Trump’s interim U.S. attorney in D.C., was demoted and sidelined after a review found he had shared secret grand jury material related to mortgage fraud inquiries involving Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. He is expected to leave the department after being demoted earlier this week, and Schiff would be well within his rights to file a bar complaint.

As loyalists flame out, career lawyers are fleeing. The Trump administration tried to offset the attrition in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office by creating emergency jump teams, demanding that offices rapidly designate prosecutors for short-term surges in unspecified critical situations.

Judges, meanwhile, are openly complaining that filings are late, orders are ignored and basic constitutional requirements are being violated. Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz noted with barely concealed exasperation that the Trump administration decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions that were certain to follow. One prosecutor, Julie Le, told a judge that the system was so broken she sometimes wished to be held in contempt just to get a full night’s sleep. She described begging ICE to comply with court orders, emailing in 24-point font and threatening to name names in filings. “I am not white, as you can see,” she told the judge, explaining that her own family was at risk of being swept up in the same dragnet she was being forced to defend.

The administration is carrying out more arrests than it has the capacity to process humanely or legally, and it’s doing so on purpose. At any moment, they could slow down, ensure people’s rights are respected and give their own attorneys time to prepare cases properly. They have refused. 

The Department of Justice used to be a career aspiration, a place where lawyers of all backgrounds believed they could serve the public and the law. Under Trump, it is increasingly becoming an agency of career suicide. Experienced attorneys are fleeing. The post-Watergate norms — that the Justice Department should operate with a degree of independence from political pressure, that it shouldn’t be used as a weapon against the president’s enemies and that the attorney general works for the American people and not as the president’s personal lawyer — is being incinerated. Bondi and her deputies are treating every legal crisis like an opportunity for a cable news hit, and turning our constitutional project into a plotline in their ongoing MAGA reality show.

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On Monday Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ​posted a video on X, the government’s de facto policy platform, explaining that the Pentagon and the Justice Department created a newfangled joint task force to identify and prosecute press leaks. 

The “joint task force” model of all things law enforcement became increasingly popular in the wake of 9/11. Now, under Donald Trump’s administration, it appears press freedom is the new terrorism. 

“George Washington himself battled leaks, insider threats and espionage,” Hegseth noted in the video. However, I’m fairly certain the secretary doesn’t know that a reason Washington disliked leaks was because of the “Conway Cabal” — one of the earliest American political leaks. It involved private letters between two senior Continental Army officers who wanted Washington replaced as commander-in-chief of the army during the Revolution.

If Hegseth dug a little deeper, he would also learn that the Founding Fathers, including Washington, frequently relied on stealth statecraft, planting press stories and other leaky behavior. Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and James Madison were colonial cyberpunks who used various encryption methods and strategically used information to influence politics, public opinion and the course of history. Jefferson was quite literally the nation’s OG cryptographer, a master of codes and ciphers that would make modern-day hackers blush. Benjamin Franklin, of course, was America’s first great newsman — a writer, publisher, editor and champion of an unbridled free press.

Hegseth’s “new” anti-leak task force is a dramatic escalatory reincarnation of older censorship efforts that even Washington would have scorned. The move also drips with hypocrisy, irony and mendacity in light of the secretary’s own leaky tenure and the Justice Department’s near-simultaneous subpoenas of five New York Times journalists who reported on Trump’s Qatari-gifted, inadequately secured designer airplane. 

Government anti-leak campaigns have a long and ignominious history, from Richard Nixon’s illegal “Plumbers” (1971-72) and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s expansion of interagency leak investigations (2001-2008) to Barack Obama’s “National Insider Threat Task Force” (2011) and Donald Trump’s first term “DOJ Leak Task Force” (2017). Obama’s group famously pictured my clients Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake alongside actual spies and mass murderers on a “WANTED”-style poster of “Those that have done us harm.” 

In once again teaming up, the Justice Department and the Pentagon can dust off the Defense Counterintelligence & Security Agency’s training courses, tool kits, templates and videos that discourage employees from choosing their conscience over their career. One McCarthyesque poster encouraged employees to rat on one another for “general suspicious behaviors,” including First Amendment activity like “making anti-U.S. comments.” Anti-leak posters featured cutesy slogans like “There’s no delete when you tweet!” and “Every leak makes us weak!” My personal favorite was “Free speech doesn’t mean careless talk,” when that’s exactly what it means. While you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater, there’s no Supreme Court ruling holding that “careless talk” is exempt from First Amendment protection; otherwise, Trump’s Truth Social posts and X feed would have been shut down long ago.

I am no stranger to government witchhunts for “leakers.” After blowing the whistle in America’s first terrorism prosecution after 9/11, the Justice Department  investigated me as part of an over-the-top leak probe. Despite years of severe and grueling retaliation — including anonymous government officials publicly calling me a “turncoat,” referring me to the state bars where I’m licensed as a lawyer and putting me on the “No-Fly” list — I got lucky because the DOJ had not yet seized upon using the antiquated Espionage Act as its weapon of choice to go after whistleblowers. All I had to do was clear my name, pay enormous legal fees, miss a bunch of flights and rebuild my entire career.

The next batch of civil servants weren’t so lucky. U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning; Air Force whistleblower Reality Winner; CIA whistleblowers Jeffrey Sterling and John Kiriakou; and NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale faced prosecution under the draconian Espionage Act and stared down decades in prison for revealing serious government malfeasance including war crimes, secret mass surveillance, civilian drone strikes and Russia’s attempts at election interference. (Trump was also charged under the Espionage Act in the classified documents case, but U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the indictment. Special counsel Jack Smith appealed in an attempt to undo the dismissal, but once Trump returned to office, Smith dismissed its appeal.)

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In full hair and makeup, Hegseth started his X video announcing the task force with a telling statement: “As you know, we live in a dynamic and dangerous threat environment where access to and accumulation of closely held information is key to understanding our world.” His words sounded shockingly similar to those of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who recently testified that secret military information helped “educate people about how the world works so that through understanding we might bring about something better.” I agree with both Hegseth and Assange that secret government information has, in fact, been key to understanding larger world dynamics, especially the global impact of war, mass surveillance, torture and other human rights violations. 

When it comes to the deleterious effects of leaking, Hegseth knows this territory well. He’s led the leakiest Pentagon ever and was responsible for one of the biggest leaks in military history. Early in his tenure, he fired three senior Pentagon officials accused of leaking. Then we had Signalgate, in which the secretary and other principals discussed real-time U.S. airstrikes on Yemen in a Signal group chat to which a journalist was added inadvertently. In fact, the Pentagon’s own inspector general issued a scathing report that found Hegseth had endangered troops and violated department policy by using the commercially-available Signal app for official business. Yet the secretary’s indisputable gift is his ability to fail up in direct proportion to his fireable conduct. 

So what will this new joint task force yield? It’s not meant to yield anything. It’s meant to chill the sharing of vital information. There will be a marked increase of federal reporter subpoenas and search warrants in national security leak cases. There will be an increase in FBI agents showing up on reporters’ doorsteps. There will be more armed raids of journalists’ homes, regardless of whether they are the subject or target of an investigation. There will be even more criminal probes and prosecutions of journalists and whistleblowers. The biggest losers of all, unfortunately, will be the public and its right to know what the government is doing, often under a Reflecting Pool-level film of algaescent secrecy.

While the Pentagon and Justice Department stand up their joint anti-leak task force, they should take a look into why leaks are on the rise despite ever more draconian measures like tracking employees’ computer downloads, restricting reporter access to government spaces and polygraphing ordinary civil servants. Such an inquiry would reveal that leaking is a time-honored practice and safety valve in a democracy, as Hegseth actually acknowledged without even realizing it. That’s something worthy of study by a joint task force of two of the largest departments in the U.S. government.

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