Search results for "Kilmar Abrego Garcia"

Judge threatens to sanction top Trump officials for 'troubling' comments

A federal judge sharply criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Monday, saying both violated court rules by making “troubling” public statements about a defendant in an ongoing criminal case.

According to Politico, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw said the officials’ remarks about Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a Salvadoran man deported illegally before being returned to face smuggling charges — breached a local rule that limits commentary on active prosecutions.

“Government employees have made extrajudicial statements that are troubling, especially where many of them are exaggerated if not simply inaccurate,” Crenshaw wrote.

He said Noem described Abrego Garcia as a “MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser and child predator,” while Bondi called him “a smuggler of humans and children and women” who made “over 100 trips.”

Although Crenshaw declined to impose a gag order, he ordered prosecutors to remind every Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Homeland (DHS) employee of the restrictions on public comment.

He warned that future breaches could bring sanctions.

The judge also criticized prosecutors for “side-stepping” earlier directives to ensure compliance and demanded copies of internal government communications about the decision to charge Abrego Garcia, saying full transparency was now required.

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Trump’s appointees issue scathing ruling: 'We can no longer trust the DOJ'

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.

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.

“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.

“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”

In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.

“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”

Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump’s political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies.

In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.

“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”
Former federal Judge John E. Jones, a George W. Bush appointee

Federal judges rarely grant interviews, and none of the judges who criticized the Justice Department in their orders granted interviews to ProPublica.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the DOJ said its attorneys are “dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law.”

“The Department stands firmly behind the professionalism and good faith of its attorneys,” said spokesperson Kiersten Pels. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Federal judges have found that the government filed statements generated by artificial intelligence that referenced nonexistent case law, wrote briefs that ignored facts and filed declarations with inaccurate dates, the ProPublica review shows.

In one case, the government included documentation claiming a detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009. That detainee, the judge noted, citing what she called the government’s persistent “sloppiness,” would have been 4 years old.

“This Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [the U.S. government] unless they are made under oath by an individual with personal knowledge,” Judge Christine O’Hearn, a President Joe Biden appointee, wrote in New Jersey while reviewing a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by a man who claimed he was unlawfully imprisoned by immigration officers. O’Hearn accused the government of defying her orders when, instead of releasing the man, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred him to a different facility in New York.

In Minnesota, the state’s top political leaders had publicly clashed with the administration following the violent ICE raids that led to the deaths of two U.S. citizens. Then the administration filed a flurry of subpoenas against them.

Last month, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, who was appointed by George W. Bush and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, slammed the government’s actions and “spurious claims,” saying the presumption of regularity was being abused.

“Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action — particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take — is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use [of] the grand-jury process,” the judge wrote.

“Breakdown” of a Presumption

The presumption of regularity creates a high bar for those suing the government or defending themselves against it in criminal cases. They often must provide evidence that the government willfully violated a policy or otherwise deviated from its charge — that is, did something irregular — to overcome the standard.

It’s a shield the government wields often, with little notice, and one that is almost always successful. But overcoming that presumption has become increasingly common under Trump’s second term, according to court watchers.

About half of the cases ProPublica identified as questioning the presumption come from districts, including D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where by proximity and jurisdiction many of Trump’s actions are challenged and often heard by Democratic-nominated judges. The Southern District of New York, which has issued repeated rebukes of Trump administration actions, and the Northern District of California, another Democratic stronghold, are other hotbeds of judicial scrutiny.

Last September, D.C. District Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui accused the administration of working around the federal grand jury process, getting an indictment from a state court after prosecutors had failed to get one in his court, which he called “unseemly,” if not “unlawful.” He fired off one of the earliest signs that the presumption itself could come into question.

“This only deepens the growing mistrust of the actions of prosecutors,” the judge wrote. “That is a sentiment that was once unthinkable, but the irregular is now the regular.” While the case was largely managed by assistant U.S. attorney Caelainn Carney, according to court transcripts, Faruqui was aiming his frustration at her bosses, including senior prosecutor Jonathan R. Hornok, and the leadership at DOJ. Neither attorney responded to requests for comment.

Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told ProPublica that Faruqui “was wrong on the law” and noted that after the government appealed to the district’s chief judge, his order was overruled. “Judge Faruqui has a long-standing documented pattern of editorializing from the bench beyond the scope of the cases before him,” Pels added.

But in recent months, skepticism about the presumption has also come from judges appointed by Republicans, such as McElroy, or in GOP strongholds.

In Indiana, Trump-appointed federal Judge James Patrick Hanlon ordered the release of Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a lawful U.S. resident, from ICE custody in March. Sarsour’s lawyers argued the government had targeted him to suppress his First Amendment right to free speech. The DOJ invoked the presumption of regularity and argued his arrest was part of an anti-terrorism dragnet, which the judge threw out.

In the Southern District of Ohio, Judge Michael R. Barrett, appointed by George W. Bush, ordered ICE to release a detainee after concluding the presumption had been overcome because the government hadn’t presented a reasonable argument that the man was a flight risk.

News outlets, including CNN, have documented federal judges’ ire with Trump’s DOJ, and some of the cases under question have been well-publicized, such as the government’s illegal deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. In that case, Judge Paula Xinis, a President Barack Obama appointee, criticized the government, saying, “You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you’ve destroyed it.”

Many of the rulings challenged one of Trump’s hallmark efforts: immigration enforcement and deportations.

“The presumption of regularity and integrity previously and routinely afforded to the Executive branch and the United States Attorney’s Office has been undeniably eroded in this jurisdiction and across the country,” O’Hearn wrote in February, noting that the federal government had repeatedly violated court orders in her district and others related to immigration operations.

In another immigration detention case, this one in Washington state, Biden-appointed Judge Lauren King said, “[t]he ‘presumption of regularity’ is dislodged here by the numerous factual errors in Respondents’ filings and by their conflicting representations.”

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge from California, said what’s happening in the courts feels more like a “political conflict” than the normal ebb and flow of the justice system.

“It’s really one branch that is really sort of questioning the legitimacy of the other one,” Fogel said. “I think the judges are trying to stand up for the legitimacy of their branch.”

Just Security, an online law and policy journal, has been tracking cases in which federal judges have admonished Trump’s prosecutors, including those involving the presumption.

“We’re witnessing a breakdown in the ways in which any administration ordinarily carries out its responsibilities, through the Justice Department in particular,” said Ryan Goodman, Just Security’s co-editor-in-chief.

Erosion of Trust, Ethics Inquiries

The erosion of trust from the federal bench comes as Trump has profoundly shifted priorities at the DOJ to align with his political platform: ending civil rights and diversity programs, deporting immigrants and stripping away environmental protections.

Those who deal with DOJ lawyers have noticed the difference in court.

Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, has faced off on environmental issues with the DOJ many times. Although they may disagree, he said, he always expected his opponents to be “fair and above board.”

That dynamic is gone, he said.

“I would call it a transformation of the role of the Justice Department,” he said. “There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.”

The result, Bernard said, is that “the government will lose more cases as a result of the way the Justice Department is behaving.”

“There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.”
Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council

Meanwhile, groups such as his are benefitting from the government brain drain. “We hired 10 litigating attorneys last year,” he said. Of those, eight came from the DOJ.

Judges aren’t just losing faith in the DOJ. Some are pushing to sanction Justice Department lawyers.

This month, Miami federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams ruled that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was an improper exercise in self-enrichment, citing the president’s lawyers for a series of misstatements in the case.

The Obama appointee referred the lawyer who brought the president’s case against the IRS, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. She also forwarded her ruling to disciplinary officials in New York, who had earlier received an ethics complaint about acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

A DOJ spokesperson called the Blanche case “nothing more than a politically motivated bar complaint, filed by partisan activists who disagree with this Administration’s policies.” Brito did not respond to a request for comment.

In Rhode Island, McElroy referred DOJ lawyers to a review board for possible discipline for their handling of the hospital investigation.

“As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary,” McElroy wrote. “DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.”

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Trump’s spiraling war fits 'classic escalation spiral' of his past failures: NYT analysis

President Donald Trump is caught in a "classic escalation spiral" as he tries desperately to escape his war with Iran, and according to a new analysis from the New York Times, his troubles with this conflict reflect a "striking" pattern that can be seen throughout many of his recent failures.

Writing for the Times on Wednesday, political columnist Jamelle Bouie discussed the recent reports suggesting that Trump and his aides were unprepared for the ongoing fallout of its military strikes on Iran, including the retaliations against U.S. personnel, strikes against other Middle Eastern nations and, crucially, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has resulted in a historically massive energy supply disruption. The administration, Bouie suggested, seemed to expect that the conflict would swiftly cause the Iranian regime to crumble, allowing it to be replaced with a more agreeable alternative. Essentially, they expected a repeat of the success in Venezuela, despite warnings that Iran would not be so easy to handle.

With the possibility of regime change all but dead, Trump now appears to be scrambling for a new endgame.

"If anything, Trump is caught in a classic escalation spiral," Bouie wrote. "When one approach fails, in this case the initial airstrikes, he moves to the next. When that fails, he bids higher. And when escalation still doesn’t produce the desired result — when he faces the choice between accepting defeat or stalemate or going even further — he goes further. Which is how we have arrived closer and closer to the use of ground troops: Thousands of Marines — and now paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne — are headed to the Middle East as Trump weighs a new offensive tied to either the Strait of Hormuz or Iranian nuclear materials."

Bouie further noted how Trump and his allies seemed genuinely unprepared for meaningful pushback from Iran against military aggression. This, he argued, fits an ongoing pattern with Trump, wherein his deeply ingrained narcissism does not allow him to consider the possibility that people might dislike and rebel against his plans.

"What’s striking is how familiar this pattern feels," Bouie wrote. "The administration did not expect the public to be repelled by DOGE. It did not expect outrage over the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It did not expect Democrats to respond to threats of partisan gerrymandering with their own push to wring as many Democratic seats as possible out of so-called blue states. The administration certainly did not expect the mass mobilizations against the deployment of National Guard troops and the use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving paramilitary force. Minnesota, in particular, appears to have caught them entirely off guard — a tendency toward docility, it seems, is their base-line assumption about everyone they oppose."

He added later: "This gets to the real problem. Donald Trump is famously indifferent to the concerns of those around him. He is a consummate narcissist, and he is, without question, the most solipsistic person ever to occupy the Oval Office. Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds."

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George W. Bush leveled for 'whitewash of Trump'

If you think former President George W. Bush is Bush is some kind of champion for good government with his recent critique of President Donlad Trump, do contain your cheers, says Bulwark editor Jonathan Last.

“… [I]t was not a criticism of Trump, it was a whitewash,” said Last, insisting it was necessary to “go HAM” on Bush because “his foolishness is an insult to everyone trying to preserve liberal democracy in this moment.”

Last’s biggest problem is Bush’s claim that “the office of the president is more important than the occupant; that the institution of the presidency gives ballast to our ship of state. For that stability we are indebted to the wisdom of our founding fathers’ governing charter and the humility of our nation’s first president. It has guided us for 250 years, and it will strengthen us for our next 250 years.”

Sounds innocuous, right? But Last called it a “deliberate misreading of history and the sum total is a whitewash of Trump and an insult to everyone struggling to preserve American liberalism.”

“We now understand that the office of the president is not more important than the occupant,” Last argued. “In fact, today we see that the character of the occupant determines the very wisdom of having the office of the presidency as it is constructed. Prior to Trump there had been good presidents and bad presidents … and yet, no president fundamentally threatened the liberal order itself. We now understand that there is a baseline threshold of character below which the powers of the presidency become toxic and the construction of the office becomes a danger to liberalism.”

If anything, Last said Trump exposed a threat lurking in the executive branch that had gone unnoticed because the prior occupants had never been so “wicked, corrupt, malicious, and ambitious in their thirst for power.”

“It turns out that if the occupant of the presidency admires dictators and wishes to be a king, then the presidency affords him a truly dangerous amount of latitude to attempt such a transformation,” said Last.

If the president is “pathologically deranged,” Last said he can use the presidency to create chaos and instability. The 2016 election, he said, showed how the Electoral College “can pervert the will of the people.” The 2020 election revealed “how the transfer of power can be attacked by a determined adversary.”

“And since 2025 we have seen that many of the Constitution’s provisions are unenforceable, that many of the checks and balances can be elided — that a great many of our constitutional protections actually relied on the honor system,” said Last.

Contrary to Bush’s claim that a combination of George Washington’s humble example and the Constitution’s wisdom “will strengthen us for our next 250 years,” Last said Trump showed us all that the “only reason we have a functioning democracy in February 2026 is because, in January 2021 Vice President Mike Pence chose to hold to his duty even as an armed mob came to lynch him at the direction of the sitting president.”

The guardrails for a functional democracy, it turns out, exist only at the whim of individuals.

“And for Bush to blithely insist that everything will work out just fine — that 250 years from now we’ll still have a liberal democracy — is an insult to everyone struggling against emergent fascism in this moment,” said Last. “’It’s him saying, Don’t get all worked up with your TDS. This is all normal.’”

“Tell that to Renee Good and Alex Pretti,” Last fired back. “Tell it to Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn. Tell it to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and Andry Hernández Romero, and Liam Ramos. Freedom is not free, you coddled, historically illiterate Pollyanna.”

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How the end of America begins

Donald Trump‘s Crusade against Kilmar Abrego Garcia is “on life support” as it may finally be dismissed this week or next by District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee. But will that be the end of this father’s and husband’s ordeal?

This week, I told you about the historic pattern associated with countries moving from democracy to tyranny. First, they start breaking the law and ignoring the Constitution in small ways, and the more they get away with it — and buy off or threaten politicians who may otherwise stop it — the more they do it. We’ve been watching Trump do this almost from the first day of his second term in office.

Then I laid out the mechanism behind that, the way men like Trump who want to become dictators co-opt the law by threatening law firms and the media, ignoring judges, and legally, verbally, or physically attacking the press, politicians, and regular citizens who speak out. Trump has done all of these things already, too, just like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán did when they were deconstructing the democracies in Russia and Hungary.

Today we look at how a country finally, fully crosses from being a self-correcting democracy into a rigid tyranny like those two countries, and how average people like us can identify that moment in time to do something about it before it is utterly too late.

Over the past few months, you may have noticed a rather strange rhythm in the news. A judge orders a man like Kilmar Abrego Garcia released and the Trump regime simply finds another way to hold or punish him. Another court blocks a deportation, and administration officials announce they’ll try again using a different legal strategy.

The result is that, as of last week, courts around the country have ruled more than 4,000 times that Trump’s ICE detentions were unlawful, and yet the detentions continue — more than 70,000 people so far, including families and children — while larger facilities are being built every day to hold still more people.

Nothing going on here in America resembles the movies we all watched as kids. Nobody announces the end of the Constitution and the rise of a new dictator or regime. The courts still appear to otherwise function, lawyers still argue their cases, and judges still write opinions explaining why the regime has overstepped its authority. Sometimes, like with the judge who just ordered Trump’s lickspittles to restore the history of George Washington’s slave-holding, their opinions are even blunt and scathing.

On paper the system appears intact, but in practice something subtler has been happening with greater and greater frequency, particularly since last summer: the rulings by the judges and the outcomes that seem to contradict them slowly drift apart. The legal system, in other words, is beginning to crack and fail under the strain of their constant “unitary executive” attacks that use the Project 2025 arguments that Trump is above the law.

This is how the end of democracy begins.

Most of us were taught a reassuring civics lesson when we were young. We were told that when our government acts illegally, we can simply go to court and the court would fix the situation. The lawsuit may take time, but once the judge decides, the matter is settled.

That belief is the quiet foundation beneath every other freedom enjoyed by the citizens of any functioning democracy. We rely on it when we speak, when we vote, and when we criticize or ridicule those in power. We assume that somewhere in the background, operating quietly but irresistibly, there exists a constitutional place where the arguments end and the court’s decisions hold those in power to account, restoring balance and maintaining our democracy.

But that’s a damn fragile assumption that hasn’t been tested in our lifetimes because we haven’t had a lawless president before, so we can easily fail to recognize it.

However, the men who wrote the Constitution — who’d actually lived under a very real tyranny — understood the fragility of that assumption through their own personal experience. They’d lived under a corrupt government that repeatedly insisted it was acting lawfully while colonists instead experienced exploitation, abuse, and brutality.

In the 1770s, history books tell us, British officials could always produce a justification for their actions. Doors were kicked in under broad and often specious warrants or no warrant at all, people were sent to prison in rigged trials, and the local judges who didn’t work for the King but stood for the rule of law were brushed aside because the King and his men said so.

Even though the British authorities always claimed a legal excuse for what they were doing, people still felt pushed around and powerless. The problem wasn’t that there were no laws, but that the regime could keep doing whatever it wanted while everyone argued about whether it was actually allowed. Just like Trump and his toadies are doing as you read these words.

Alexander Hamilton addressed this directly in Federalist 78 when he explained the peculiar weakness of courts in any republic. The judiciary, he wrote, “has no influence over either the sword or the purse… It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” [emphasis Hamilton’s] Courts don’t command armies or control money; they issue their decisions and depend on the rest of government — and the approval of the public — to carry them out.

That arrangement only works so long as everyone agrees that a court’s judgment ends the matter. The moment officials discover they can treat a loss in court as a temporary inconvenience rather than a binding stop sign, the character of the entire system changes from democracy to something else altogether.

Nothing dramatic needs to occur for this transition to begin. Elections continue to happen, politicians and pundits offer complaints and justifications, and the legal briefs pile up in the courthouse files. But the practical effect of a ruling weakens, because the losing side — in this case, the Trump regime — simply continues under a new rationale so the argument starts all over again, while they keep doing what they were doing before they were challenged.

We see this with ICE routinely violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as I detailed yesterday. With Trump defying the law and withholding monies appropriated by Congress. With Whiskey Pete Hegseth murdering people on the open seas day after day in defiance of both American and international law. With “Blankie” Kristi Noem refusing to hand evidence in the Good and Pretti murders over to local authorities, and “Have You Looked At The Dow?!?” Pam Bondi refusing to hand evidence of Trump-aligned billionaires’ participation in Epstein’s gruesome crimes over to Congress.

And it usually begins with the emerging dictatorship going after the weakest groups among the population.

Hitler’s first victims — in his first weeks in office — were trans people, the same group Republicans whipped up hate against to seize office last year. Putin went after “outsider” Chechens, who weren’t ethnically, linguistically, or culturally Russian. Orbán campaigned and won election on a slogan of “build the wall” along Hungary’s southern border to keep out brown-skinned Syrian refugees (and he then built the wall when in office).

History tells us that tyranny invariably begins with attacks on those easiest to ignore, the marginal, the disliked, the politically powerless, like the “Mexican murderers and rapists” Trump turned into electoral gold in 2016. Most citizens simply shrug when they hear about it, because they don’t imagine themselves ending up in the same position.

But once emboldened with their early successes, within short order tyrants and their toadies always move on from the weakest to arresting and punishing those who might restrain them through legal or public pressure: lawyers, entertainers, reporters, pundits, students, professors, universities, nonprofits, media outlets, and eventually opposition politicians.

Over time, a dictatorial regime’s habit forms: act first, deal with the consequences later. Kill a few people in the streets. Jail a couple of judges and politicians. Prosecute a smattering of reporters. Defund democratic institutions like NPR, VOA, and USAID. Gut the social safety net to throw the working class into crisis so they’re otherwise occupied.

And through it all, keep ignoring the court orders and relentlessly move forward in the project of deconstructing the democracy that was carefully built and nurtured for centuries before.

Losing in court or even at the ballot box becomes mere delay instead of defeat, until eventually the public grows accustomed to seeing courts disagree with the government while the government just plows ahead anyway.

When that happens, the line between democracy and tyranny has first, quietly, been crossed. If not stopped right away, it’s all downhill from there.

Before that line is hit, elections actually change the direction of public policy because politicians and bureaucrats are committed to listening to public opinion, following the law, and obeying the courts.

After that line’s been crossed, elections merely alter political theater, as the machinery of tyranny continues grinding forward. The forms of democracy remain, but their corrective power fades, not because judges stopped ruling, but because rulings stopped controlling events.

Just ask any modern Russian or Hungarian. Or read the history of Europe in the early 20th century.

As a German professor told reporter Milton Mayer in the early 1950s of his experience living through the rise of Hitler:

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

None of this means a democratic country suddenly flips into tyranny on some particular, identifiable day, whether proclaimed or not. It means that freedom depends on whether citizens, officials, and institutions stand up to the wannabe tyrant and demand that legal decisions have real-world consequences.

In other words, public opinion is the last wall a tyrant must shatter. It’s where, when it prevails, tyranny is finally stopped. And that is you and me.

The founders’ ultimate safeguard of our democracy was neither heroism nor violence (Second Amendment nuts notwithstanding), but the shared expectation that the law binds the leader even when he protests. When that expectation falls apart, when the judiciary’s orders are routinely ignored, Hamilton’s warning becomes more than a theory and the nation’s democracy only survives if the public loudly demands its judgments be honored.

Understanding this tells us what we must do now and next.

We must pay attention when courts order the government to change course, and raise hell when the Trump regime ignores those orders.
We must regularly call our elected officials and demand that they require legal rulings be followed, particularly if they’re Republicans and such a position may be politically costly to them.
We must support local and national leaders who defend our court’s decisions instead of treating them as optional obstacles.
And we must participate in the civic pressure between elections that keeps the constitutional machinery honest, because voting alone can’t overcome a regime that’s learned it can disregard the referee whenever it wants.

A free republic doesn’t depend on its leaders never overreaching; it depends on overreaches producing immediate and painful consequences. The danger moment arrives quietly, however, when a nation gets comfortable with the idea that the leader and his sycophants can keep breaking the law even after courts and public opinion told them they must stop.

Hamilton warned us the courts possess judgment but neither sword nor purse, and Jefferson told us our government exists solely by “the consent of the governed.”

Whether those judgments still govern events in America has always been up to us.

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DOJ prosecutors prefer 'face-planting in court' to angering Trump: NYT

Federal prosecutors in President Donald Trump's Department of Justice (DOJ) are increasingly opting to embarrass themselves in court rather than risk the wrath of the White House.

That's according to a Friday article by the New York Times' Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, who reported that the DOJ's recent string of public losses are seen as highly uncharacteristic of the federal government. One recent example is the DOJ failing to convince a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), just one week after a separate grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia declined to return an indictment.

"Federal grand juries almost never decline to bring an indictment once, much less twice. Such rejections, known as 'no true bills,' have been exceedingly rare, a misfire that often stigmatizes the prosecutors involved," Thrush and Feuer wrote. "They are becoming more common, and accepted, in a department where face-planting in court might be preferable to facing down the boss."

The same day Trump's DOJ struck out with the Alexandria grand jury, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ruled that detained Maryland man Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was to be freed immediately, saying the government had no "lawful authority" to keep him in custody. The Trump administration had threatened to send Abrego Garcia to Liberia and Costa Rica, though never followed through on those threats while keeping Abrego Garcia in custody for more than four months.

Former U.S. Attorney John P. Fishwick told the Times that Trump had done himself no favors by aggressively publicizing his efforts to strike back at his political enemies via indictments, which may have soured the public against him.

"I think many of these cases are nationalized for the public and there is a pushback on Trump and his targeting of individuals," Fishwick said. "This is a major shift."

The failures to indict James and keep Abrego Garcia in detention are only the most recent examples. In Washington D.C., U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has consistently failed to get grand juries to return indictments of local residents, including a man who threw a Subway sandwich at federal agents. Prosecutors in Chicago, Illinois have also failed to get grand juries to indict Chicagoans arrested as part of the administration's "Operation: Midway Blitz."

Click here to read the Times' report in its entirety (subscription required).

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New court documents show DOJ lied to judge multiple times: legal experts

The Justice Department may have been caught lying in court – and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche could be on the hook for it, legal experts say.

There has been an ongoing court case involving Kilmar Ábrego García, who was was sent to the El Salvador prison CECOT against another judge's ruling.

That case has exposed the Justice Department for possible wrongdoing.

Speaking on a Saturday podcast, MSW Media's Allison Gill and "All Rise News" reporter Adam Klasfeld walked through the new documents uploaded to the docket for the Ábrego case.

"There's been some stuff going on under seal," explained Gill. "Ex parte hearings, things that have been redacted. Stuff that's under seal."

She said that it seems to be related to a finding by U.S. District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw that there was evidence of "vindictive prosecution." Gill said that it appears that the quick prosecutions of Ábrego may have been a deliberate attempt to stop a case before another judge could uncover possible wrongdoing in that case.

In June, Blanche appeared on Fox News where he said that they began investigating Ábrego after a Maryland court judge demanded the man be returned. What Blanche said indicated there was a likelihood of vindictiveness. Gill said that what was missing, however, were the documents that could prove that Blanche made the decision to prosecute.

For months, Gill said she and Klasfeld have discussed the DOJ's claimed that prosecution of Ábrego had nothing to do with Blanche or an effort to shut down document discovery from the DOJ. The department has consistently said that the decision to go after Ábrego rested only with U.S. Attorney Robert E. McGuire, of the Middle District of Tennessee.

The new documents, revealed late Friday night, "finally pried loose some evidence showing Todd Blanche's involvement in prosecuting Mr. Ábrego."

The filing that was released begins: "For months, the government has insisted that this is not a vindictive prosecution because Acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire alone made the decision to charge Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia after he challenged his unlawful deportation to El Salvador. Six lawyers for the government — including the Associate Attorney General of the United States Stanley Woodward and Acting U.S. Attorney McGuire — signed a brief averring that 'undisputed evidence shows that there is no link between the Office of the Deputy Attorney General and the decision to prosecute.'"

It continues: "The government has repeatedly claimed — sometimes under penalty of perjury — that the buck stopped with Mr. McGuire. That claim, it turns out, was false. It remains unknown where the buck actually stopped — the Deputy Attorney General? The Attorney General? The White House? We may never know. But what we do know, from documents the defense and the Court had to pry out of the government’s hands, is that the government deceived the Court, the defense, and the public about Mr. McGuire’s purported status as the sole decision maker. Put bluntly, numerous government lawyers chose to mislead this Court in order to try to save this unjust prosecution."

"We now know: it was Mr. Blanche and his office, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General," the lawyers write.

Gill called it indicative of a lot of other cases under the purview of the DOJ and "implicates them in some bad stuff that result in the dismissal of these charges or the dismissal of other charges."

"For them to say, 'we don't know where the buck stops, but what we do know is Todd Blanch had a hand in it,'" Gill continued. The revelation could result in court sanctions.

She noted that even with the redactions in the documents it becomes clear that Blanche told the lower-level prosecutors what to do.

"It is, I think, definitive proof that this administration is vindictively and selectively prosecuting him. To punish him, to get discoveryto stop," Gill continued.

Klasfeld brought the conversation back around to the entire probe into vindictive and selective prosecution coming from Blanche's interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox.

Klasfeld also noted that Blanche has tried to quash any efforts to have him testify in the case, claiming that there is no link between Blanche and U.S. Attorney McGuire.

"The only thing the Court found missing from the record was evidence 'tying [Mr. Blanche’s statements] to actual decision makers.' (Id. at 8). Not anymore. Previously, the Court rightly wondered who placed this case on Mr. McGuire’s desk and what their motivations were. (Dkt. 185 at 2). We now know: it was Mr. Blanche and his office, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, or 'ODAG.'"

"So, they say it, flat out," Klasfeld noted. "Apparently, the messages are so damning that they say one, that's why they're no longer credible, and two, they're changing their story. They said there was no link. Now they're saying this was 'unremarkable oversight.'"

Ábrego has already won his civil case, and if he wins on the vindictive prosecution, the other cases are gone.

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Trump may have doomed DOJ’s Fed chair probe before it even began

On Sunday, January 11, the news broke that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is conducting a criminal investigation of U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell —who has been clashing with President Donald Trump over monetary policy. And it didn't take Trump's critics long to attack the probe as a frivolous, politically motivated waste of DOJ resources.

Much of the criticism came from Democrats, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). But some conservative Republicans called Trump and the DOJ out as well, including Sens. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) —who told NBC News, "It's clear the administration's investigation is nothing more than an attempt at coercion…. The stakes are too high to look the other way: if the Federal Reserve loses its independence, the stability of our markets and the broader economy will suffer."

On X, formerly Twitter, Tillis tweeted, " I will oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed — including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy — until this legal matter is fully resolved."

According to Politico reporters Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, however, the biggest threat to DOJ's Powell investigation may be Trump himself.

"President Donald Trump's campaign to criminally investigate his political adversaries keeps running into an intractable problem: his mouth," the Politico journalists explain in an article published on January 13. "The news Sunday that the Justice Department has been secretly weighing charges against Fed Chair Jerome Powell — a frequent target of Trump's attacks — alarmed lawmakers, who called it an effort to weaponize the justice system to affect economic policy. But Trump's freewheeling commentary has gotten in the way of past prosecutions he demanded — and could get in the way this time, too."

The more that Trump rails against his opponents, Cheney and Gerstein observe, the more DOJ probes of them suffer.

"Trump openly called for the prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James — who were subsequently charged by a prosecutor he handpicked for the job — and has demanded similar action against former special counsel Jack Smith, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and others against whom he harbors grudges for investigating him in recent years," the Politico reporters note. "Trump has long attacked Powell over his monetary policy, but more recently, he has focused on Powell's management of the Fed itself, even suggesting Powell could be investigated or sued for his role overseeing a building renovation beset by cost overruns."

Cheney and Gerstein add, "In July, Trump called on Powell to 'resign immediately'…. Trump's loose talk about Comey and James helped sink those prosecutions, at least for now, and it has already complicated other criminal and civil cases, including the effort to prosecute and deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Trump's bid to remove Powell's colleague, Fed governor Lisa Cook."

Read Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein's full article for Politico at this link.

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ICE official tells judge someone else wrote his declaration in Kilmar García case

Kilmar Armando Ábrego García's ongoing case was back in court on Thursday as Judge Paula Xinis questioned U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

It was revealed that top immigration official John Cantú didn't draft the sworn statements submitted to the court for the case. The statement was previously sealed, Lawfare's Roger Parloff wrote in a BlueSky thread.

Ábrego was sent to an El Salvador prison, despite a judge's order not to send him to the country. Initially, the administration sought to deport him to various African countries such as Uganda, Eswatini and now, Liberia.

Ábrego sought to go to Costa Rica, but Cantú wrote, and the government has alleged, that the country would not accept him.

Legal analyst Adam Klasfeld, of "All Rise News," reported on X, "A senior ICE official just admitted in an evidentiary hearing in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case that someone else drafted his declaration in the case and he didn’t know what certain words meant."

Parloff, who was live-posting about the court hearing, cited Judge Xinis saying that the witness had zero information about the content of his declaration.

"No shade on you Mr. Cantú," Xinis said, according to Parloff. "You've been very candid with the court."

Ábrego's attorney, Sascha Rand, asked who might have more information "about the sum and substance of your declaration that we could go talk to?"

Cantú responded, saying, "No, sir. As far as I know, I'm the only one he talked to," Parloff relayed.

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Trump targets another Late Night comedian

After failing to use the government’s might to bully Jimmy Kimmel off the air earlier this fall, President Donald Trump is once again threatening to bring the force of law down on comedians for the egregious crime of making fun of him.

This time, his target was NBC late-night host Seth Meyers, whom the president said, in a Truth Social post Saturday, “may be the least talented person to ‘perform’ live in the history of television.”

On Thursday, the comedian hosted a segment mocking Trump’s bizarre distaste for the electromagnetic catapults aboard Navy ships, which the president said he may sign an executive order to replace with older (and less efficient) steam-powered ones.

Trump did not take kindly to Meyers’ barbs: “On and on he went, a truly deranged lunatic. Why does NBC waste its time and money on a guy like this??? - NO TALENT, NO RATINGS, 100% ANTI TRUMP, WHICH IS PROBABLY ILLEGAL!!!”

It is, of course, not “illegal” for a late-night comedian, or any other news reporter or commentator, for that matter, to be “anti-Trump.” But it’s not the first time the president has made such a suggestion. Amid the backlash against Kimmel’s firing in September, Trump asserted that networks that give him “bad publicity or press” should have their licenses taken away.

“I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me... I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away,” Trump said. “All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”

His FCC director, Brendan Carr, used a similar logic to justify his pressure campaign to get Kimmel booted by ABC, which he said could be punished for airing what he determined was “distorted” content.

Before Kimmel, Carr suggested in April that Comcast may be violating its broadcast licenses after MSNBC declined to air a White House press briefing in which the administration defended its wrongful deportation of Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

“You need to understand that he actually believes it is illegal to criticize him,” wrote Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on social media following Trump’s tirade against Meyers. “Why? Because Trump believes he—not the people—decides the law. This is why we are in the middle of, not on the verge of, a totalitarian takeover.”

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'Just say yes': Trump begs reporter to accept that doctored photo is real

ABC News' Day 100 interview with President Donald Trump went off the rails after reporter Terry Moran refused to accept Trump's false assertion that an altered photo was real.

Trump and Moran were discussing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the Maryland resident who the administration admitted was deported by mistake — when Trump brought up the photoshopped image of Abrego Garcia's knuckles that made it look as if Abrego Garcia was publicly affiliating with the MS-13 gang.

"He said he wasn't a member of a gang, and then you look on his knuckles, they said 'MS-13' — wait a minute — he had 'MS-13' on his knuckles."

"That was photoshopped," Moran said.

"That was photoshopped? Terry, I've given you the big break of a lifetime," Trump responded. "You're doing the interview. I picked you because frankly, I've never heard of you, but that's OK. Terry, you're not being very nice."

Moran pointed out that the photo Trump was referencing was proven to be fake, as Abrego Garcia was photographed alongside Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) at the senator's hotel, and the purported tattoos were not present. Trump pushed back and insisted the photo was real and offered to show it to Moran, though the ABC News journalist attempted to pivot the conversation to Ukraine. He ultimately relented when Trump pushed him to finally say that he would "look at" the photo again at a later time.

"It's such a disservice," Trump bristled. "Why don't you just say yes, he does, and go on to something else?"

Watch the clip below, or by clicking this link.

This exchange is so very telling. Trump repeatedly claims the photoshopped MS-13 on Kilmar Abrego Garcia's knuckles is real, Terry Moran keeps telling him it isn't, prompting Trump to say this: "I never heard of you. I picked you. You’re not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed... Just say yes!"

[image or embed]
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) April 29, 2025 at 8:46 PM

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