Trump’s plan to fleece American taxpayers ran into a tiny speed bump on Friday thanks to Judge Kathleen Williams of the Southern District of Florida. Williams is saddled with Trump’s preposterous trollsuit against the IRS for the wrongful disclosure of his tax returns by a contractor in 2020 … but perhaps not for much longer.

The suit is defective in every respect, particularly the $10 billion damage demand. Trump insists he’s entitled to $1,000 for every click on a New York Times article about the leaked returns — despite the fact that the law specifies that the disclosure must be by an “officer or employee of the United States,” i.e. not a journalist. It’s also time-barred, since the relevant statute requires the victim to file within two years of discovering the breach.

Trump claims he didn’t find out about the disclosure until January of 2024 when the leaker, Charles Littlejohn, was sentenced. This is somewhat undercut by his sparklemagic lawyer Alina Habba’s appearance at a plea hearing in October of 2023, where she announced that she was “here on behalf of President Trump who was a victim, as we just heard, of this atrocity.” See also: all those New York Times stories about his family’s finances that ran in 2020 and 2022.

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But dissecting the complaint’s deficiencies risks stepping into a world of make believe where this is an actual civil action, rather than a lawsuit-shaped a pretext to allow the president to loot the Treasury. Indeed, Trump himself acknowledged as much just days after he filing his complaint.

“I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he babbled to reporters, adding that “We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care because it's going to go to numerous very good charities.”

Whether “nobody would care” is an open question. On April 17, counsel for Trump and attorneys for the DOJ — but I repeat myself! — filed a joint motion to stay proceedings for 90 days “while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation.” Just as they did in Michael Flynn’s moribund tort claim over the Russia investigation, the government is telegraphing its intent to cut the president a check he could never collect in court.

But Judge Williams refuses to lend her judicial imprimatur to what is effectively the bank teller opening the till and pocketing the cash — or at least, not yet.

Noting that no lawyer for the government has even bothered to enter an appearance and “the only scheduled event at issue is Defendants’ response to the Complaint,” she instead instructed the parties to explain how the court has jurisdiction over a matter in which there’s no actual dispute. Because judges derive their authority from the Constitution, and Article III limits them to adjudicating actual cases or controversies. And kayfabe where the president connives with his employees to pillage government coffers and then demands judicial blessing for naked corruption don’t cut it.

“Typically, adverseness is found in a situation where one party is asserting its right and the other party is resisting,” Judge Williams wrote, observing that no president in history has been more clear that he exerts personal control over every employee in every branch of the federal government — particularly employees at supposedly independent agencies like the Justice Department.

“[T]he Attorney General, has a statutory obligation to defend the IRS when it is hailed into court, but then is ostensibly required by executive mandate to adhere to the President’s opinion on a matter of law in such a case,” she continued. “This raises questions over whether the Parties here are truly antagonistic to each other.”

In plain English, the court is ordering the parties to explain how there can be adversity when Trump is both the plaintiff and defendant. As she points out, even as Trump insists he’s suing in his personal capacity, the case is captioned “President Donald J. Trump” and refers to him by his official title throughout.

In the past, conservatives decried so-called “sue-and-settle” agreements as a tool to enact environmental policy via sham lawsuits without buy-in from Congress. But once they took the House, Senate, and White House, they changed their tune. Two weeks ago, the FTC simultaneously “sued” various advertising trade groups for violating antitrust law by advocating for brand safety standards that make Elon Musk mad (light paraphrase) and docketed a stipulated settlement. In June, the Justice Department sued Texas over its policy of providing in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. Just six hours later, Judge Reed O’Connor approved a “settlement” zeroing out a duly enacted provision of Texas state law.

Both of these cases were filed in the Northern District of Texas, guaranteeing they’d draw conservative judges who have become an effective rubber stamp for Trump DOJ shenanigans. The ploy works less well in other courtrooms, even those presided over by his own appointees. In the Eastern District of Texas, the Trump administration hoped to nullify the Johnson Amendment, which bars churches from political endorsements as a condition of maintaining their tax-exempt status. The complaint was filed in the waning days of the Biden administration, but once back in the White House, Trump’s DOJ moved quickly to grant the plaintiffs’ wish — effectively transforming it into a sue-and-settle case. But Judge J. Campbell Barker rejected the ploy, dismissing the complaint for lack of jurisdiction, since there’s no actual dispute when both parties are on the same side and agree on the remedy.

It would appear that Judge Williams is preparing to do the same. She’s given the government and Trump until May 20 to explain how they’re actually adverse. And if there’s no justiciable conflict, then the court can’t approve a “settlement.”

By the logic of such a ruling, any lawsuit filed by the sitting president against his own government is definitionally non-justiciable. Or, at the very least, this president can’t sue the government, since he’s burned down every firewall and insisted that he has the right to control every organ of the executive branch. If Trump is the government, he can’t sue himself and claim that the lawsuit is anything other than a sham.

But getting tossed out of court can’t ultimately preclude a settlement. Trump could simply order the IRS to cut him a check, as he seems likely to do with the administrative claim he filed demanding $230 million for “abuses” he suffered during the stolen documents and election interference cases. The only question is whether he’ll have the fig leaf of a federal judge blessing his settlement with himself. The cost to the taxpayer is the same, but this way would at least spare the judiciary from sullying itself with his flagrant self-dealing.

Or, if Judge Williams dismisses the case, Trump can always refile it in the Northern District of Texas and get one of his buddies to sign the permission slip.

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On Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit held that states can require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, despite a Supreme Court decision from 1980 saying exactly the opposite.

Cosplaying as legal historians returning us to an originalist Eden, the appeals court stomped on both the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and the very concept of jurisprudence itself. Henceforth, history is whatever a pack of ideologues jockeying for the next Supreme Court vacancy say it is — actual subject matter experts need not apply.

God on the wall

Last June, the Texas legislature enacted SB10, which requires public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. But not just any version! The law specifies that it must be the Protestant rendition, in ye olde English, as laid out in the King James Bible. All day, every day, Texas children must study under the watchful eye of a 20-inch tall listicle in “easy readable typeface” reminding them that “I AM the LORD thy God.”

That’s followed by eleven commandments:

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.

Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.

(Oops. Well, counting was never the strong suit for Texas Republicans, anyway.)

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“Actual malice standard is now what some would call a legal lay up,” tweeted FBI Director Kash Patel. He vows to sue The Atlantic over a story published Friday which describes him as habitually drunk and wholly lacking in judgment.

“I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook,” he warned the magazine.

Patel then went on Fox to promise Maria Bartiromo that he intends to file tomorrow — or today as you’re reading this — and a million lawyers and journalists simultaneously kicked their feet in gleeful anticipation.

Please, oh, please give us something to laugh about in this cursed news cycle of death!

Patel’s co-pilot on this doomed outing is former Stop the Steal lawyer Jesse Binnall, whose eponymous firm represents various MAGA also-rans, including Mike Flynn, Hunter Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski, and Patel’s girlfriend Alexis Wilkins, who is definitely not an Israeli agent.

In 2024, Binnall sued CNN over reports that former North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson he posted lewd comments to various porn discussion forums under the handle “minisoldr.” Binnall stumbled out of the gate by violating the state’s ban on including an ad damnum (damages) clause in the complaint, a rule which exists to stop litigants from holding press conferences on the courthouse steps announcing that they’re suing for $50 million — exactly what Binnall and Robinson did. The case was quietly dropped four months later.

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It will be hard to top that legal tour de force, but Binnall is giving it the old college try. He began by tweeting out the pre-publication cease-and-desist letter he sent demanding that The Atlantic kill the piece. As the Daily Beast pointed out, the letter included multiple allegations that didn’t make it into the final version of the story, including a claim that Patel shut down the FBI gift shop so that he could browse alone. This strongly suggests that The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick was actually doing her damnedest to verify every single claim. It’s also the kind of thing most lawyers place behind redaction bars, but, hey, you do you, Jessie B!

Patel reportedly complained the items on offer were not “intimidating enough,” which must have stung coming from the marketing maven behind the clothing company Based Apparel and K$H wine.

As for the veracity of the story, it’s hardly news that Patel likes a tipple. He was famously photographed on a “work” trip to the Winter Olympics pounding beers with the victorious men’s hockey team. Veteran reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick cites dozens of sources who say that Patel has been drunk in public at DC club Ned’s and the Poodle Room in Las Vegas; that meetings had to be rescheduled early in his tenure because he was too hungover to function; and that members of his security detail have had difficulty rousing him because he was seemingly intoxicated.

Binnall insists that this cannot possibly be true because “Director Patel has likewise made The Atlantic expressly aware that these allegations are false.” He also cites “the FBI’s documented operational successes under Director Patel” including “the capture of the #8 fugitive on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list within just three months.” (Notably, he doesn’t mention the arrest of Charlie Kirk’s murderer, which Patel apparently bungled.)

A “reasonable and responsible pre-publication investigation, including a simple request to the FBI for relevant documentary evidence” would have disproven many of the piece’s claims, Binnall insists. This is somewhat belied by his own client tweeting the FBI’s blanket denial with zero offers of “documentary evidence” in response to Fitzpatrick’s pre-publication request for comment.

To be fair, Binnall (and his client) may be ever so slightly confused about the legal standard to prove defamation of a public figure. They seem to think that references to general antipathy paired with conclusory allegations that the reports behaved recklessly are good enough to demonstrate actual malice.

We haven’t yet seen whatever Binnall’s magicking up for Patel, but in the Robinson case, he claimed that “Defendant CNN acted with actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth, as demonstrated by Defendant’s antipathy, ill-will, and desire to inflict harm on Lt. Gov. Robinson, CNN’s actual knowledge of the dubious nature and timing of the allegations, its use of unverifiable data to corroborate its reporting, its reckless failure to investigate, and its knowledge of exculpatory information and alternative explanations that it deliberately omitted from the CNN Article.”

When Binnall sued the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson on behalf of Mike Flynn, he was similarly hand-wave-y about the pleading standard — with predictable results.

“Here, the onus was on Flynn to prove by clear and convincing evidence that Wilson entertained ‘serious doubts’ about the accuracy of the articles stating that at least some believers in the QAnon conspiracy think that Flynn is Q. But Flynn did not submit an affidavit or other record evidence demonstrating Wilson's ‘actual malice,” the Florida appeals court wrote, adding that “If Flynn is not Q (or one of the Qs), then it presumably would not have been hard for him to have filed an affidavit with the trial court to that effect.”

So much for that whole “lay up” thing.

The Atlantic’s lawyers are unlikely to be as careless.

“The Atlantic is nothing but diligent and we have amazing lawyers and amazing editors and I stand by every word,” Fitzpatrick told MSNOW’s Jen Psaki on Sunday, noting that neither the White House nor the Justice Department has denied her reporting.

The Atlantic’s lawyers are also aware that Binnall is suing MSNOW commentator Frank Figliuzzi in Texas for saying that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.” And they’re aware that Nevada, where Patel lives, has a robust anti-SLAPP statute which applies in federal court under Ninth Circuit precedent — unlike the federal court in DC, where the magazine is domiciled.

Whether Binnall knows this is an open question. Mike Flynn wound up paying Rick Wilson’s legal fees after Binnall steered him into the wood chipper in Florida.

But projections about this turkey of a lawsuit before it’s even filed may be giving Patel and Binnall too much credit. Even if this thing had a prayer in hell of succeeding, Patel would light himself on fire rather than sit for a videotaped deposition about his drinking habits. The purpose of this exercise is to prove to the White House that he’s sticking it to the libs and hopefully to save his job. That’s why he’s telling Bartiromo that he’s just about to round up the perps who stole the 2020 election.

Pay no attention to that funky condensation on your screen, that’s just the Director’s flop sweat. Patel might buy himself a few more days by promising that he’s just about to lock up Trump’s enemies, but sooner or later — and probably sooner — he’ll be back to hawking MAGA gear to the rubes. Which is a good thing, because that dude has got a lot of legal bills to pay.

On Tuesday, the government filed a motion to vacate the convictions of four members of the Proud Boys militia for their prominent roles in the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola were convicted by a jury of seditious conspiracy on May 4, 2023. But now, almost three years later, the Justice Department insists that the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit must retroactively eradicate their convictions to end “these years-long, Biden-era weaponized prosecutions.”

And they’re not above fudging the law to get what they want. (The DOJ is also running this same playbook in a bunch of other January 6th cases, including the Oath Keepers, some of whom were convicted of terrorism in addition to seditious conspiracy. Friend of the show Marcy Wheeler breaks down that companion motion in a post here.)

Back when the DOJ worked

In September of 2023, Judge Timothy Kelly of the US District Court for DC sentenced Nordean, a ringleader of the assault on the Capitol, to 18 years in prison. Biggs got 17 years; Rehl, 15; and Pezzola, twelve.

On his very first day back in the White House, Donald Trump issued a blanket pardon to most, but not all, of the January 6th insurrectionists to end “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people” and to begin “a process of national reconciliation.” Fourteen people, all of them members of the Oath Keepers militia or the Proud Boys, were exempted from the general pardon and received commutations instead — which certainly seems to suggest that their crimes were qualitatively different from other participants in the attack. But for the militia members, including Nordean, Biggs, Rehl, and Pezzola, the distinction didn’t really matter. They were immediately released along with everyone else and have been walking around free ever since.

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In July, President Trump announced the construction of a new ballroom adjacent to the White House.

“It’ll be near it but not touching it—and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” he said, vowing to protect the East Wing. “It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”

By October, the East Wing was gone, reduced to a pile of rubble dumped in East Potomac Park.

The president lied. And when he got sued by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to block construction of the planned 90,000-square foot neo-Versailles monstrosity, his administration lied some more.

But there are consequences when you lie to federal judges, as the president just found out for the second time in three weeks. The DC Circuit has now ordered the government to explain exactly which part of this gilded monument to Trump’s vanity is for national security, with an eye to blocking everything else.

Please!

Judge Richard Leon, the irascible Bush appointee overseeing this case at the district court, issued a walloping preliminary injunction on March 31. In his inimitable style, he doled out 27 exclamation points and four “pleases.” Such as “according to Defendants, any construction delay will undermine national security. Please!”

The trial judge described the government’s legal theory as a “Rube Goldberg contraption” — which is kinder than calling it bullshit, but less accurate.

Under 40 U.S.C. § 8106, “a building or structure shall not be erected on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.” The White House is part of President's Park, which encompasses the White House Visitor Center, Lafayette Park, the Eisenhower Office Building, the Treasury Building, and the Ellipse. So that would seem to be the end of the matter. But the administration points to 3 U.S.C. § 105(d), which authorizes Congress to appropriate funds to the president for the “care, maintenance, repair, alteration, refurnishing, improvement, air-conditioning, heating, and lighting” of the White House Executive Residence. The claim is that this law empowers Trump to tear down or construct anything he likes.

Could he pave paradise and put up a parking lot … or a Trump Tower? The DOJ says YES!

Congress only appropriated $2.5 million for Trump to “maintain” the White House, but luckily Trump’s corporate pals — many of whom just happen to have business before the federal government! — are queuing up to pick up the tab.

The National Park Service can accept private donations under 54 USC § 101101, and gladly started hoovering up cash. But during the early phase of the lawsuit, the White House claimed that the Park Service had handed all funds off to the Office of the Executive Residence (EXR), which is the responsible for janitorial, cooking, and general maintenance of the White House, and no longer controlled any aspect of the project.

This wheeze was enough to defeat the first iteration of the Trust’s case, which was based on the Administrative Procedure Act. Since the APA only applies to agency actions, and EXR isn’t an agency, Judge Leon denied the Trust’s first motion for a preliminary injunction. At the same time, he strongly hinted that the Trust should refile its action as an ultra vires claim.

On March 1, the Trust obediently docketed the amended ultra vires complaint, and on March 31, Judge Leon granted a preliminary injunction blocking construction of the ballroom except as “necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House.” This caveat reflected the changing reality on the ground, as well as the government’s shifting claims about the project.

Previously, to defeat the Trust’s request for a temporary restraining order preserving the status quo, the government said that it was only constructing below-grade features, including an armored bunker, hospital, and classified military installation, all of which were billed as necessary for national security (and wholly separate from the decorative building planned above them). The government represented that none of that construction would lock in design features above ground, and thus there was no imminent harm to enjoin.

“Any aesthetic harms remain hypothetical (if cognizable at all), because plans for the East Wing are still in development, months remain until the start of above-ground construction, and the work that must proceed below-grade will not lock in the scope of the above-grade construction,” the DOJ wrote in a reply brief.

But as the project progressed, with planned construction of the ballroom itself scheduled to be begin this month, the government’s position shifted. Suddenly, the entire structure now implicated national security, whether above or below-grade. “Canvas tents, which are necessary without a ballroom, are significantly more vulnerable to missiles, drones, and other threats than a hardened national security facility,” the administration insisted in an emergency motion to the DC Circuit seeking to stay the trial court’s injunction.

“This order is untenable and must be stayed in that the building is under construction, with deep Top Secret excavations, foundations, and structures, already built, and ready to receive heavily fortified, for security reasons, steel, bullet, ballistic, and blast proof glass, and drone proof roofing materials, which must be finished quickly, and not allowed to be exposed to the conditions and elements of an open construction site,” the government warned. “Time is of the essence!”

Meanwhile at the White House, Trump insisted that the work would continue as before because the injunction allowed construction as needed for national security, “So that’s called ‘I’m allowed to continue building as necessary.’”

The Trust filed a motion to clarify, asking Judge Leon to tell the White House that they can’t just shout NATIONAL SECURITY! and keep building. But meanwhile, the DC Circuit panel issued its ruling on Saturday.

Making the record

In dissent, Trump appointee Judge Neomi Rao huffed that she would have stayed Judge Leon’s order in its entirety. She insisted that 3 U.S.C. § 105(d) is capacious enough to allow Trump to do literally anything he likes to the people’s house. And she rejected the Trust’s claim to aesthetic standing based on the disgust and horror of trustees who see this temple of vulgarity when they walk through Lafayette Park.

These arguments will surely feature prominently — one hopes in an angry dissent! — when the case lands at the Supreme Court. But yesterday’s majority consisted of Judges Patricia Millet and Brad Garcia, appointed respectively by Obama and Biden, who simply rolled their eyes at the government’s histrionics.

Citing “serious factual questions about the relationship between, on the one hand, above-ground construction of the ballroom itself and the maintenance of safety and security, and prior governmental representations that the below-ground and above-ground stages were distinct and the above-ground design features subject to change,” the majority remanded the case to Judge Leon with orders to “promptly address the pending motion to clarify how the injunction and its exception will ensure safety and security pending litigation.”

This will create a more robust record, locking the government into claims about the security implications of each element of the project. Alternatively, the panel gave the White House until Friday to ask the Supreme Court for yet another shadow docket assist, on the theory that making Trump wait to do something illegal, when he really wants to do it anyway, constitutes irreparable harm.

So far, the government hasn’t signaled if it intends to ask the six horsemen of the apocalypse to weigh in. But you can bet your sweet bippy that Judge Leon is raring to ask the government whether it was lying to in January when it said that the natsec stuff was underground, or in April when it accused him of endangering the president by making him eat dinner in a tent where he might get drone striked.

Please!

Pam Bondi’s public toadying was so unseemly that she turned herself into a South Park meme about brown nosing. But in his very first press conference as Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche may have bested her performance.

Upon Bondi’s unceremonious exit, the contestants for America’s Next Top Prosecutor immediately began jockeying for position. Blanche, who’s been Deputy Attorney General for 14 months and is now Acting AG, looks to be the one to beat — despite having been the man with has hands on the wheel during Bondi’s entire, disastrous tenure. On the other hand, the competition includes Alina Habba and Jeanine Pirro, so …

But Blanche isn’t just vying to out-sycophant the competition by professing his slavish adoration. He’s also making patently false statements about the propriety of the president weaponizing the Justice Department to smite his political enemies. In Blanche’s telling, justice has never been blind, nor should it be.

“That is the most false statement I’ve ever heard in my life,” he scoffed, when someone pointed out that there has traditionally been a firewall between the White House and DOJ.

That’s horse shit. And it’s horse shit Blanche himself called out just two years ago.

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The former Attorney General’s picture is barely cold in the trashcan, and already her would-be replacements are jockeying to be the next lawyer to land headfirst in the rubbish, with only a pile of congressional subpoenas to cushion the blow.

Jeanine! Alina! Harmeet! The gang’s all here.

This job is objectively a shit sandwich. An increasingly demented and desperate president is staring down the likely loss of at least one House of Congress in the midterms and a wildly unpopular war that refuses to end no matter how much he shitposts at it. The one thing Trump wants from the DOJ is the scalps of his enemies — a prize that moves ever further out of reach as statutes of limitations run.

The problem isn’t that Pam Bondi lacked “smarts and guts,” as Trump reportedly complained. The former county prosecutor and Florida state AG worked like hell to give her boss the perp walks he demanded. The problem is that the American legal system, battered as it is, retains a stubborn capacity to distinguish between actual crimes and the president's personal grievances.

Darn you, grand juries! Darn you, federal judges! Darn you, probable cause!

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This is a problem familiar to Jeanine Pirro, Trump’s second choice to lead the US Attorneys Office in DC. After Ed Martin failed to win Senate confirmation, Trump tapped the former Fox News host for the job. Pirro was a former state prosecutor in New York, but her chops are a little rusty. She’s gotten no-billed dozens of times by grand juries, suffered an embarrassing string of losses related to DHS’s “surge” into DC, and her subpoena for the Federal Reserve got quashed by Chief Judge James Boasberg, who found that the DOJ’s “justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual.”

For the case against lawmakers who posted a video reminding service members of their obligation to disregard illegal orders, Pirro brought in a ringer — a retired state prosecutor currently working as a dance photographer. But his presentation fell flat, and not a single grand juror voted to indict.

The Atlantic reports that Pirro is undeterred, and is actively lobbying for the job at Mar-a-Lago. She’s joined by Trump’s sparklemagic lawyer, Alina Habba, who recently relocated to Florida to be closer to the action. The former dress-up US Attorney for New Jersey is theoretically a senior Justice Department official advising on US Attorneys Offices. She’s never prosecuted a federal case in her life, but Caligula made his horse a consul so … sure, why not?

Other reported contenders include EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who practiced law for three whole years in Long Island before being elected to the New York State Senate. Trump has referred to Zeldin as his “secret weapon,” thanks to Zeldin’s uncanny ability to pump out expedited permits for hydrocarbon extraction, which is just like running the world’s largest law firm.

CBS reports that Harmeet Dhillon, another of Trump’s personal lawyers, is in the mix, too. Dhillon presided over the evisceration of the DOJ’s Civil Division, reorienting the office to hunt trans kids and protect white men from academic and workplace “discrimination.” But unlike Bondi, who understood that social media is just a tool for pumping out content to keep sweet with the White House, Dhillon isn’t in on the joke. She actually boasted once to the Wall Street Journal that she wakes up and scrolls X.com for “a list of new horrors,” after which “I text my deputies, and we assign cases, and we get cranking.” She could turn the DOJ into an anti-DEI machine without blinking. (Because she never blinks.)

Senators Mike Lee and Eric Schmitt are mentioned as possible candidates as well, but the real man to beat is Deputy AG Todd Blanche, yet another of Trump’s former personal lawyers. In the post announcing that Bondi would be relocated to a farm upstate where she could run around and chase squirrels with the other discarded former lawyers — say hi to Rudy! — Trump said “our Deputy Attorney General, and a very talented and respected Legal Mind, Todd Blanche, will step in to serve as Acting Attorney General.”

Graded on the Trump curve, Blanche is comparatively qualified: He worked as a prosecutor at SDNY early in his career. He has actual experience in Justice Department leadership. He’s not obviously delusional.

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But if Blanche wasn’t able to make those political prosecutions happen as the second-in-command at DOJ, why would he be able to do it from the big chair?

He’s also got some stink on him from the Epstein files, another grenade Bondi tried and failed to diffuse for the president. Blanche interviewed Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in person, right around the time she found herself transferred from Florida to a cushy facility in Texas that categorically bars sex offenders. It was at this meeting that Maxwell remembered that Trump was always a perfect gentleman when she knew him — an amazing coincidence Blanche will certainly be asked about in a congressional hearing if he takes the top job. Will he be reduced to screeching about the stock market when asked about his boss’s former buddy?

There is one more potential wrench in the works. Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who doomed Ed Martin’s nomination by making sure he never got out of the Judiciary Committee, says he’s a “no” on anyone who downplays the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

“For me, the threshold for somebody following Pam Bondi ends the moment I hear they said one thing that excused the events of January the 6th. I’ve been very clear on that,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “So I hope whoever they have in mind to follow General Bondi is very clear-eyed on my position on Jan. 6.”

So … none of the above?

Whoever succeeds Bondi will preside over an institution that’s been gutted during her 14-month tenure. More than 6,400 employees were either fired, resigned, or took early retirement. The Civil Rights Division lost roughly three-quarters of its attorneys. The share of top law school graduates applying to work at DOJ has plummeted, and US Attorneys are reduced to asking anyone with a MAGA hat and a bar card to slide into their DMs. Worst of all, judicial deference to the government is decimated, thanks to the terrible, mendacious arguments Bondi forced her employees to make during the past 14 months.

“I won’t believe it until you testify. That’s what has happened to the credibility of your office,” New Jersey Judge Zahid Quraishi excoriated a hapless AUSA in March. “Generations of Assistant U.S. Attorneys had built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy it within a year.”

None of that will change for whichever lickspittle slobbers his or her way to the top of Main Justice. Bondi’s successor may be a better manager, or have a clearer understanding of how federal prosecutions work. But he or she won’t be able to magic up crimes by Trump’s enemies where none exist.

The only thing different is the name on the next portrait to wind up in the trash.

As the DHS funding lapse drags on, American airports are at buckling. TSA agents haven’t been paid for six weeks and are calling out sick in record numbers — some airports have more than a third of staff MIA, and more than 500 TSA agents have quit altogether. This weekend saw hours-long security lines, with travelers arriving four hours early and still missing their flights.

Trump’s first brain wave was to send in ICE agents, who are getting paid. Turns out a squad of untrained thugs whose main job is civil rights violations weren’t much help. Senate Republicans begged him to sign a partial DHS bill that would have funded TSA but not ICE and CBP, but he insisted that they ought to just kill the filibuster instead.

And so President Fire Alarm did what he always does: Shout “EMERGENCY!” and then claim the power to break the law.

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On Friday he signed an executive order instructing newly-minted DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to pay TSA agents, despite the fact that there’s no money appropriated to do it.

Decrying “congressional Democrats’ reckless decision to prioritize criminal illegal aliens over American citizens,” Trump ordered Mullin to “to use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations to provide TSA employees with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the Democrat-led DHS shutdown, consistent with applicable law, including 31 U.S.C. 1301(a).”

Usually Trump just gestures vaguely in the direction of Article II of the Constitution and claims the power to command the sun to rise in the west, so perhaps he’s due one muted cheer for pointing to the actual code. But that statutory cite is quite a head-scratcher. Section 1301(a) says only that “Appropriations shall be applied only to the objects for which the appropriations were made except as otherwise provided by law.” Trump is specifically ordering DHS to apply appropriations to objects for which they were not made — effectively citing the rule he's breaking as justification for breaking it.

CNN reports that Trump intends to siphon off cash for TSA from the deportation slush fund in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which is keeping ICE’s goons paid during the DHS shutdown. Congress appropriated that $75 billion for ICE and CBP specifically as multi-year or no-year funding, which doesn't expire at the end of the fiscal year and isn't subject to the annual appropriations cycle. So when DHS funding lapsed in February, ICE and CBP kept spending because they had a separate, still-active pot of money that the shutdown couldn't touch.

The theory here is that airport security has a “reasonable and logical nexus” to border operations — a test that appears nowhere in the statute, nowhere in relevant caselaw, and that the White House invented wholesale for the occasion. But maybe if you take several shots of Everclear and squint real hard, working the X-ray belt in Toledo counts as border patrol activity and can be paid for out of OBBBA.

Sadly Tom “Cava” Homan was still sober Sunday morning when he sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper, protesting that he was but a simple policeman, who knows nothing about the law.

There is no universe in which the OBBBA funds can legally be used to pay TSA agents. The Antideficiency Act bars federal agencies from obligating or spending funds before they are appropriated or in excess of the amount approved by Congress. And putting in your executive order that you’ll “adjust applicable funding accounts within DHS” once Congress appropriates money for TSA doesn’t fix the problem.

Under the Constitution, Congress has the power of the purse. The Trump administration has systematically disregarded this, ignoring congressional appropriations and ordering the shutdown down of everything from Voice of America to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Particularly in this moment, Democrats have an affirmative obligation to use all their leverage over the budget to control how tax dollars are spent.

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Right now, Democrats want an agreement that ICE and CBP will: quit pretending that administrative warrants it signs for itself are the same as judicial warrants; take off the masks and put on badges that identify them; and quit conducting raids in sensitive locations, like hospitals, churches, and schools. Trump wants to keep doing those things, and he’s pretending that he can cancel out Congress’s leverage with accounting tricks.

And so it’s a bit disappointing to see Democrats asking why Trump didn’t steal the money — and their own power! — sooner.

“Tom Homan did an excellent job of dodging your question earlier in the show when he said that he doesn't know why Trump didn't start paying the TSA agents sooner if they had the authority all along,” New Jersey Senator Andy Kim replied. “Well, I know the answer to that. The American people know it's because he didn't care about them, that he cared about ICE. He cares about his efforts to antagonize and assault the American people in our communities.”

Senator Kim is great, but this answer is terrible. The reason Trump didn’t steal the money sooner was because it’s flatly illegal and he was hoping Congress would buckle and give him the money with no strings attached. When Democrats used their leverage to make the shutdown unpleasant, he rejected any compromise and effectively kicked over the table.

By validating that gambit and complaining only about its timing, Democrats are giving up their own power to get ICE under control. As Senate Majority Leader Thune admitted, Trump's illegal order “takes the immediate pressure off” Republicans to negotiate with Democrats, allowing everyone to leave town for a two-week recess without getting screamed at in the airport.

Obviously, TSA workers deserve to be paid. But the law requires them to be paid by an act of Congress, not a presidential raid on border security funds. Framing the debate as a question of why the president didn’t steal the money faster is like a little old lady tut-tutting at a mugger for failing to snatch her handbag at a reasonable hour. Congress has the power of the purse, and they need to keep socking that mugger in the nose when he tries to grab it!

“We investigate when it’s appropriate to investigate,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche assured Fox News. “And that is not the case here. So, no, we are not investigating.”

Millions of people had just watched ICE Agent Jonathan Ross shout “Fucking bitch!” as he shot Minnesota poet Renee Good through the drivers’ side window of her car when the president’s former criminal lawyer said there was nothing to see here, folks. But that didn’t mean the feds were going to step back and let Minnesota law enforcement do their jobs. The FBI had seized all the evidence, and it wasn’t about to give it back.

Just four days later, immigration agents shot Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, whom the DOJ initially charged with attacking the agent who shot him, only to drop the case because the agents’ sworn statements were “materially inconsistent” with what had actually happened. Then agents wrestled ICU nurse Alex Pretti to the ground and shot him in the back. In both cases, the FBI excluded the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) from the scene, seized all the evidence, and refused to allow state officials to access it.

Now the state attorney general, along with the Hennepin County Attorney and the BCA, are suing to force the federal government to hand it over.

Crime wave

On the morning of January 7, Renee Good and her wife Becca were driving home from school drop off when they came upon ICE in their Minneapolis neighborhood. They stopped the car to record, and angry agents gave conflicting instructions — one ordered them to drive away, while another tried to open the door to their minivan. As Good was attempting to leave, Ross shot her three times through the front and driver’s side window.

The FBI’s Minneapolis field office and the US Attorney’s Office for Minnesota agreed to conduct a joint investigation with BCA. But within hours, DHS officials were calling Good a “domestic terrorist” and insisting that she’d tried to run Ross over. Trump even implied that Ross was in the hospital, despite multiple recordings showing him walking around unharmed after firing his gun. That evening, the DOJ informed the BCA superintendent there would be no joint investigation and no evidence sharing. Good’s car was taken into FBI custody, where it remains shrink-wrapped and unprocessed to this day.

This is very much not normal. In any prior administration, the Justice Department and Homeland Security would have immediately launched civil rights and after-action investigations in conjunction with local law enforcement. Weeks later, Deputy AG Blanche conceded as much when he grudgingly agreed to begin an investigation into the Pretti shooting, noting that “The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has the best experts in the world at this. They’ve been doing it for decades and and so I expect that that investigation will will proceed with that with those parameters in mind.” (That investigation appears to have come to nothing.)

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