Tag Archives: George W. Bush

Washington Post: Prosecutors push toward charging other Trump foes after Letitia James

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With the president pressuring the Justice Department to swiftly prosecute his rivals, federal prosecutors in at least five jurisdictions are pursuing possible cases.

President Donald Trump’s unprecedented efforts to pressure the Justice Department into prosecuting his perceived enemies have, so far, netted swift results — and more may be on the way.

In a matter of only two weeks, his handpicked U.S. attorney in Alexandria, Lindsey Halligan, obtained indictments against two frequent targets: former FBI Director James B. Comey and, on Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Federal prosecutors across the country are pursuing several other investigations, many of which Trump has personally called for. Those include investigations into a sitting U.S. senator, former top leaders of the FBI and CIA and the Georgia prosecutor who charged Trump in a massive 2020 election conspiracy case.

The next set of charges could be coming quickly. Under pressure from senior Justice Department officials, federal prosecutors in Maryland are preparing to ask a grand jury to indict John Bolton, Trump’s first-term national security adviser, in a classified documents case. Charges could come as soon as the coming week, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation.

Many of Trump’s targets, including Comey, charged with lying to Congress, and James, indicted on allegations of mortgage fraud, have derided the cases against them as baseless and driven by political retribution.

Here’s what to know about where investigations of Trump’s other perceived foes stand:

John Bolton, former Trump national security adviser

Federal authorities in Maryland have been investigating Bolton, a veteran diplomat turned fierce Trump critic, since earlier this year on allegations he illegally retained classified material after his 2019 resignation.

Multiple people familiar with the evidence against him have described the case as generally stronger than those against James and Comey. Court records unsealed last month indicate that FBI agents recovered documents marked classified while searching Bolton’s downtown Washington office.

In seeking a warrant to search the facility, investigators revealed they believed they would find classified records there in part because of information they learned through a foreign adversary hacking into Bolton’s AOL email account years ago.

Kelly O. Hayes, acting U.S. attorney in Maryland, a veteran federal prosecutor whom the Trump administration elevated to the office’s top job this year, is overseeing the case. The prosecution is being led by Tom Sullivan, who heads the national security and cyber divisions in Hayes’s office. Sullivan was previously part of the special counsel team that investigated former president Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents in 2023.

Bolton’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, has said the documents marked classified found in Bolton’s office stem from his time in the administration of George W. Bush and had been cleared for his use decades ago.

“An objective and thorough review will show nothing inappropriate was stored or kept by Amb. Bolton,” Lowell said in a statement.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California)

Schiff, a vocal Trump critic who led the House investigation that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment, is facing investigation on mortgage fraud allegations similar to those lodged Thursday against James.

Both inquiries were initiated by criminal referrals from Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and pursued by Ed Martin, a former interim U.S. attorney in Washington turned Justice Department official.

In recent weeks, Martin has met with Hayes, the Maryland U.S. attorney, who is also overseeing the investigation of the senator, to discuss the progress of the investigation.

The inquiry is centered on Pulte’s assertion that Schiff misled lenders while buying a second home in Potomac in 2003 by claiming the property would be his primary residence.

Schiff and his lawyer — former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara — dismiss Pulte’s claims as politically motivated, “transparently false, stale and long debunked.” Bharara privately wrote to the Justice Department in July arguing there was “no factual basis” for those claims and provided documentation to exonerate the senator.

Schiff’s mortgage lender was aware from the start that he and his wife were buying the Maryland house so his family could live there when he was working in Washington, Bharara wrote, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by The Washington Post. To convict Schiff of mortgage fraud, prosecutors would have to prove that Schiff intended to deceive.

Still, after James’ indictment this week, Schiff is now bracing for the prospect that he could be indicted within a matter of weeks, according to two people familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

“Those of us on the president’s enemies list — and it is a long and growing list — will not be intimidated, we will not be deterred,” the senator told reporters Thursday. “We will do our jobs. We will stand up to this president.”

Lisa Cook, Federal Reserve governor

Federal prosecutors in Georgia are also pursuing a mortgage fraud investigation targeting Cook, the Biden-appointed Federal Reserve governor whom Trump is seeking to fire from the central bank.

Last month, investigators issued subpoenas as part of the inquiry, which began with a referral from Pulte, and Martin has conferred with law enforcement officials in the state. Pulte has accused Cook of claiming both a home in Michigan and a condominium in Georgia as “primary residences” on mortgage applications.

Cook’s lawyers deny she committed a crime and have suggested in court papers that she “mislabeled” her homes in her mortgage applications.

John Brennan, former CIA director

The Justice Department acknowledged in July that it had opened an investigation into Obama-era CIA director John Brennan, one of many targets the president has said should be prosecuted for involvement in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

John Ratcliffe, the current CIA director, and Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, referred Brennan and others, including Comey, to the Justice Department. They alleged that Brennan and others manipulated a 2017 intelligence assessment to wrongly tie the Trump campaign to Moscow’s efforts and later lied about it to Congress.

In recent weeks, federal investigators in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania have conducted some interviews as part of the investigation, though its full scope remains unclear, one person familiar with its progress said.

One other current and one former official familiar with the matter suggested Gabbard may have undermined the investigation’s progress. Earlier this year, she publicly revoked the security clearances of 37 people who had been drafting the 2017 intelligence assessment, accusing them of politicizing intelligence and failing to safeguard classified information.

Her comments may have damaged their credibility as witnesses in any potential case against Brennan, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the ongoing investigation.

FBI officials under former director Christopher A. Wray

In a separate investigation centered on the 2016 election, federal authorities in the Roanoke-based Western District of Virginia are investigating claims that senior bureau officials under former FBI director Christopher A. Wray mishandled or sought to destroy documents related to the Russia investigation.

That inquiry appears to have been sparked by allegations first floated by current FBI Director Kash Patel, who said in July he had discovered thousands of pages of records in “burn bags” at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington. He has suggested they were placed there to cover up wrongdoing by his predecessors at the FBI.

Some of those records — linked to an investigation by special counsel John Durham about the origins of the Russia investigation — have since been released by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Current and former national security officials have questioned the premise of Patel’s allegations, noting that many of the records he claims to have uncovered had also been stored on government computer servers for years.

Fani T. Willis, Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney

The New York Times reported last month that the Justice Department had issued a subpoena for travel records of Willis, the Atlanta-area prosecutor who brought a sprawling racketeering case against the president and more than a dozen allies, accusing them of illegally seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

The investigation of Willis is being overseen by Theodore S. Hertzberg, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. But the scope of the inquiry remains unclear — including which records were subpoenaed and from whom.

The Times reported that the subpoena sought information tied to overseas trips Willis took around the time of the 2024 election. But Willis had not personally received a subpoena, her spokesman Jeff DiSantis said.

Trump has railed against Willis since her office charged him in 2023, calling his prosecution a “witch hunt.” The case remains the only remaining criminal matter in which Trump is charged, though Willis and her office are no longer leading the prosecution.

Last month, the Georgia Supreme Court denied Willis’s appeal of a lower court decision that removed her and her office from the proceedings after she was accused of an improper relationship with an outside attorney she appointed to the lead the case.

A state agency is now looking for a new prosecutor to take on the case. Willis has acknowledged she would likely continue to be a target of the president and his supporters.

“I am fully aware that there will be people in power over the next four years who may seek to use that power to lash out at those who are working to uphold the rule of law,” Willis told The Post in January. “I will not be intimidated by threats or acts of revenge.”

Prosecutors push toward charging other Trump foes after Letitia James

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/prosecutors-push-toward-charging-other-trump-foes-after-letitia-james/ar-AA1OgMRK

Miami Herald: GOP lawmaker makes blockbuster claim: FBI has at least 20 names of suspected Epstein clients

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A Republican lawmaker revealed for the first time Wednesday that there is a quasi-list of suspected clients of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that can be compiled from a series of witness statements and other evidence gathered by the FBI.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told the House Judiciary Committee that he thinks the FBI has the names of at least 20 people tied to Epstein, including prominent figures in the music industry, finance, politics and banking.

Massie’s statement comes as FBI Director Kash Patel testified under oath before Congress over two days of contentious hearings, during which he continued to insist that there is no “client list” and no credible evidence that Epstein trafficked underage girls to anyone other than himself.

But Massie cited files used by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York which summarize interviews with witnesses and suspects.

The lawmaker claimed those files include “one Hollywood producer worth a few 100 million dollars, one royal prince, one high-profile individual in the music industry, one very prominent banker, one high profile government official, one high profile former politician, one owner of a car company in Italy, one rock star, one magician, at least six billionaires, including a billionaire from Canada. We know these people exist in the FBI files, the files that you control.”

Patel said he asked FBI agents to review the existing files and added “any investigations that arise from any credible investigation will be brought. There have been no new materials brought to me.”

On Tuesday, Patel blamed former Miami federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta for what he called the “Original Sin” — explaining that the decision to give federal immunity to Epstein in 2008 has hampered almost every effort by the FBI and Justice Department to hold those involved in Epstein’s criminal operation accountable.

Patel, a podcaster who once called for the release of the files and helped propagate conspiracy theories about why they weren’t being made public, testified just days before Acosta is set to finally tell his side of the story before a congressional committee. On Friday, Acosta will be grilled by the House Oversight Committee in closed-door testimony for the first time since he resigned as U.S. labor secretary amid renewed scrutiny of the case.

Acosta was just 37 and a rising star in the Republican Party who had noble ambitions of becoming a U.S. Supreme Court justice when he was namedU.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in 2005. By the time he was sworn in, the FBI was already investigating Epstein, and evidence suggested that the crimes against children and young women he committed in Palm Beach went well beyond Florida.

Now 56, Acosta has almost vanished from public life, other than appearing from time to time to discuss economic issues on the conservative TV network Newsmax, where he is also on the network’s board of directors and chair of its audit committee. The Miami Herald was unsuccessful in obtaining a comment from Newsmax, which in recent months has portrayed Acosta as a victim of the “deep state,” suggesting that Epstein and Maxwell were unfairly targeted.

Acosta still owns a $2.6 million mansion in McLean, Virginia, which he and his wife bought after being named labor secretary by President Donald Trump in 2017. Nowadays, he advises private market ventures and serves as a public speaker, according to his Newsmax bio.

A first-generation Cuban American, Acosta skipped his senior year of high school to enter Harvard a year early. Upon graduation in 1994, he worked as a law clerk for future Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, who was then a federal appeals court judge. Acosta then took a job with the prestigious law firm Kirkland and Ellis in Washington and became a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative organization that has influenced the appointment of judges, including members of the Supreme Court.

Acosta was appointed in 2001 under the George W. Bush administration as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and also served on the National Labor Relations Board before being appointed U.S. Attorney in Miami.

Acosta has rarely spoken about the Epstein case. To this day, he has stood firm on his decision to give Epstein a plea deal, arguing in the past that the evidence wasn’t strong enough to prosecute him on serious sex trafficking charges.

But an investigation, completed in 2020 by the Justice Department, concluded that Acosta had used “poor judgement” in resolving the case with such a lenient plea deal — one that not only gave Epstein immunity from federal charges, but also gave immunity to four co-conspirators and an unidentified number of others who were involved. Under the deal, Epstein pleaded guilty in state court to solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of a minor under 18. He was sentenced to 18 months in the county jail, but served 13 — most of it under a “work release” program which enabled him to leave prison during the day. (It was later revealed that he continued to sexually abused young women in his Palm Beach “office” while he was an inmate).

Acosta has also blamed the Palm Beach state attorney, Barry Krischer — specifically his decision early on to pursue only a misdemeanor charge and a fine against Epstein, which complicated any future federal prosecution.

Krischer called Acosta’s reasoning an attempt to “rewrite history.”

“No matter how my office resolved the state charges, the U.S. Attorney always had the ability to file his own criminal charges,” Krischer said in a statement at the time of Acosta’s resignation.

The lead line prosecutor who handled the case in Florida, Marie Villafaña, told federal investigators in 2019 that she had drawn up a 53-page draft indictment in 2007 against Epstein accusing him of sex trafficking minors while running a systemic operation using others to recruit girls. If convicted, Epstein may have served life in prison. Villafaña, who has never spoken publicly and has since resigned, told investigators she pleaded with her bosses to prosecute him — to no avail.

The DOJ’s investigation into Epstein’s plea deal also hit several roadblocks, among them: the discovery that 11 months’ worth of Acosta’s emails during the negotiations had vanished. Federal investigators blamed the gap – from May 2007 to April 2008 – on a technical glitch that they said wasn’t isolated to Acosta and had affected other federal email accounts.

The missing emails included the months and days leading up to and following October 12, 2007, when Acosta had a private breakfast meeting in Palm Beachwith Epstein’s lawyer, Jay Lefkowitz, a former Kirkland and Ellis law colleague.

The Miami Herald, in its 2018 investigation of the case, uncovered evidence suggesting that Epstein and his battery of high-priced attorneys exerted undue influence over both state and federal prosecutors. Among other lawyers hired by Epstein: former Clinton special prosecutor and Kirkland and Ellis lawyer Kenneth Starr; lawyer and friend Alan Dershowitz (who was later accused by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre of sexual abuse, though she later recanted); and Miami lawyer Lilly Anne Sanchez, who, according to the DOJ probe, had dated one of the federal prosecutors on the Epstein case, Matthew Menchel.

Emails between Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors obtained by the Herald showed that Epstein’s lawyers repeatedly made demands and that federal prosecutors acquiesced each step of the way.

“Thank you for the commitment you made to me during our Oct. 12 meeting,’’ Lefkowitz wrote in a letter to Acosta after their breakfast meeting in Palm Beach. He added that he was hopeful that Acosta would abide by a promise to keep the deal confidential. By law, prosecutors were required to notify Epstein’s victims in advance of any plea agreement.

“The original sin in the Epstein case was the way it was initially brought by Mr. Acosta,” Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Mr. Acosta allowed Epstein to enter — in 2008 — to plea to a non-prosecution agreement which then the courts issued mandates and protective orders legally prohibiting anyone from ever seeing that material ever again without the permission of the court. The non-prosecution also barred future prosecutions of those involved at that time.”

A judge later ruled that the Epstein deal was illegal, but the courts ultimately ruled that it was too late to undo it.

Still, the deal’s provisions did not stop the then-U.S. attorney in New York, Geoffrey Berman, from bringing new charges against Epstein in 2019 in the wake of the Herald’s series. Epstein, 66, was arrested on July 6, 2019 on federal charges of sex trafficking minors. A month later, Epstein was found hanging in his cell. The medical examiner in New York ruled his death a suicide, although Epstein’s brother, a private forensic pathologist he hired and Epstein’s lawyers have said they don’t believe Epstein killed himself.

Prosecutors did arrest Epstein’s former girlfriend, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted on sex trafficking charges in 2021 and is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence. She is appealing her conviction to the Supreme Court, and part of her argument is that she is covered by the immunity clause in the 2008 agreement, even though she was not named.

Former attorney general William Barr testified for the Oversight Committee under a subpoena last month that he was confident Epstein’s death was a suicide. He also disputed rumors that Epstein had any ties to intelligence agencies.

Barr, who worked for the CIA while in law school in the 1970s, said the notion that Epstein was working for intelligence was “dubious.”

“Many American businessmen who have foreign contacts sometimes will talk to intelligence agencies and provide information to them,” Barr said. “And the CIA has a unit that goes around and talks to people who are well-connected and asks them questions.”

GOP lawmaker makes blockbuster claim: FBI has at least 20 names of suspected Epstein clients
“We know these people exist in the FBI files, the files that you control.”

https://www.miamiherald.com/article312146310.html

Roll Call: Republicans move to change Senate rules to speed confirmation of some nominees

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Facing insurmountable backlog, Thune moves to allow consideration of multiple nominees as a group

Senate Majority Leader John Thune took the first procedural step Monday toward changing the chamber’s rules to speed up the confirmation of lower-level Trump nominees, saying the move is necessary to combat obstruction from Democrats.

Democrats this Congress have forced the GOP majority to use valuable floor time on procedural votes, slowing down the confirmation process and leaving spots unfilled in the Trump administration.

Republicans argue Democrats are destroying a Senate tradition of quickly confirming noncontroversial nominees regardless of the party of the president. But Democrats contend the posture is a needed negotiating tool as Trump has burned through government norms and at times embraced an authoritarian attitude of executive power.

Thune, R-S.D., late Monday asked for immediate consideration of an executive resolution that would authorize the en bloc consideration in executive session of certain nominations. In order to place it on the calendar, he said, he objected to his own request.

The resolution now lies over one calendar day. A copy of the resolution was not immediately available Monday night.

Thune said in a floor speech earlier Monday that after Trump’s eight months in office this term, no civilian nominee has been confirmed by voice vote.

He compared that to other presidents: George W. Bush and Barack Obama each had 90 percent of their civilian nominees confirmed on voice vote, and Trump in his first term and Biden had more than 50 percent.

“It’s time to take steps to restore Senate precedent and codify in Senate rules what was once understood to be standard practice, and that is the Senate acting expeditiously on presidential nominations to allow a president to get his team into place,” Thune said.

Thune said Republicans would seek to speed up confirmations. The change would apply to nominees at the sub-Cabinet level and not Article III judicial nominees, he said.

The objective, he said, was “confirming groups of nominees all together so the president can have his team in place and so the Senate can focus on the important legislative work in its charge.”

The Senate would have to take another 600 votes before the end of the year to clear the current backlog of nominees on the calendar and at committee, Thune said.

“That’s more votes than this record-breaking Senate has taken all year up until now,” Thune said. “There is no practical way that we could come close to filling all the vacancies in the four years of this administration, no matter how many hours the Senate works.”

Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed the GOP effort, warning Republicans that they would come to regret the decision to “go nuclear.”

“What will stop Donald Trump from nominating even worse individuals than we’ve seen to date, knowing this chamber will rubber-stamp anything he wishes?” Schumer said.

The move is the latest in a history of changing Senate rules to lower vote thresholds in the chamber.

Under then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Republicans in 2017 removed the 60-vote requirement for confirming Supreme Court justices as they sought to confirm Neil M. Gorsuch.

Years before, in 2013, Senate Democrats did away with that vote threshold for other judicial nominees.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, some Senate Democrats have sought to use the lower-level confirmations as a pressure point.

In May, Schumer announced a hold on all Justice Department nominees after the administration agreed to accept a plane from Qatar. That move from Schumer prevented U.S. attorney nominees from moving forward on voice votes.

The same month, Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, put a hold on Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

Durbin also warned he might do so for other U.S. attorney nominees who reach the Senate floor.

In February, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, announced he was putting a blanket hold on all Trump administration State Department nominees over the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Just ram King Donald’s incompetent appointees through the process!

Republicans move to change Senate rules to speed confirmation of some nominees – Roll Call
Republicans move to change Senate rules to speed confirmation of some nominees – Congress

https://rollcall.com/2025/09/09/republicans-move-to-change-senate-rules-to-speed-confirmation-of-some-nominees

New York Times: Seal Team 6 slaughters unarmed crew of N. Korean fisherman diving for shell fish.

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Their real mission was a flop.

Trump failed to report the covert mission to Congress as required by law.

How a Top Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission Into North Korea Fell Apart
The 2019 operation, greenlit by President Trump, sought a strategic edge. It left unarmed North Koreans dead.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-trump-2019.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jk8.hF-Z.CC2MsPBmUyK2&smid=url-share

Newsweek: Donald Trump suffers big legal blow over migrant deportations

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President Donald Trump was blocked by a federal appeals court from using an 18th-century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport Venezuelan migrants his administration says belong to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua.

Newsweek contacted the White House for comment by email after office hours.

Why It Matters

Trump has, through executive order, invoked the Alien Enemies Act by arguing that there is an invasion of the U.S. by foreign criminal gangs that his administration has now designated as terrorist groups.

The court decision bars deportations from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

What To Know

The 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found that there was not an “invasion or predatory incursion” by a foreign power as required by the 1798 statute to justify its invocation in the case of this group of migrants.

The Alien Enemies Act is a wartime law passed in 1798 as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts under President John Adams. It grants the U.S. president the authority to detain, restrict or deport foreign nationals from a country that is at war with the United States.

Unlike other provisions in the Alien and Sedition Acts, which expired or were repealed, the Alien Enemies Act remains in effect today.

The act was only used three times before in U.S. history, all during declared wars: in the War of 1812 and the two World Wars.

On April 19, the Supreme Court instructed the Trump administration to pause the deportation of a number of Venezuelan men in custody using the 1798 law.

The Trump administration unsuccessfully argued that courts cannot second-guess the president’s determination that Tren de Aragua was connected to Venezuela’s government and represented a danger to the United States, meriting use of the act.

In the majority were U.S. Circuit Judges Leslie Southwick, a George W. Bush appointee, and Irma Carrillo Ramirez, a Joe Biden appointee. Andrew Oldham, a Trump appointee, dissented.

“A country encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organized force to occupy, to disrupt, or to otherwise harm the United States,” the judges wrote.

In a lengthy dissent, Oldham complained his two colleagues were second-guessing Trump’s conduct of foreign affairs and national security, realms where courts usually give the president great deference.

What People Are Saying

Lee Gelernt, who argued the case for the American Civil Liberties Union, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying: “The Trump administration’s use of a wartime statute during peacetime to regulate immigration was rightly shut down by the court. This is a critically important decision reining in the administration’s view that it can simply declare an emergency without any oversight by the courts.”

What Happens Next

The case appears set to return to the Supreme Court in what is shaping up to be a decisive battle over Mr. Trump’s ability to use the Alien Enemies Act, the New York Times reported.

Donald Trump suffers big legal blow over migrant deportations
The Alien Enemies Act was only used three times before in U.S. history, all during declared wars—in the War of 1812 and the two World Wars.

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-legal-blow-deportation-migrants-alien-enemies-act-2123573

Daily Beast: Trump Takes Revenge Against FEMA Workers Who Warned He’s Risking Disaster

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FEMA employees were abruptly placed on administrative leave Tuesday—just 24 hours after they signed an explosive open letter warning Donald Trump that the agency is being dragged back to its pre-Katrina dark ages.

The letter, signed by 191 current and former FEMA staffers, was sent to Congress and top officials on Monday. Its message was blunt—the people now running FEMA are inexperienced, politically driven, and dismantling the very programs that keep Americans safe when disaster strikes.

The writers warned that, left unchecked, the agency could stumble into catastrophe. By Tuesday evening, FEMA’s administrator’s office had fired back with suspension letters.

The employees were told they would remain in “non-duty status” but keep their pay and benefits, effectively being benched for speaking out.

The letter also cited decisions made by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem as a reason the agency could fail to manage disaster responses.

FEMA confirmed that multiple employees were placed on immediate leave, though the exact number remains unclear. Of the nearly 200 signatories, only about 36 revealed their names publicly, The Washington Post and CNN reported.

“It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform. Change is always hard. It is especially for those invested in the status quo, who have forgotten that their duty is to the American people not entrenched bureaucracy,” a FEMA spokesperson told the Daily Beast.

“Under the Biden Administration, the American people were abandoned as disasters ravaged North Carolina, and needed aid was denied based on party affiliation in Florida. Our obligation is to survivors, not to protecting broken systems. Under the leadership of Secretary Noem, FEMA will return to its mission of assisting Americans at their most vulnerable.”

Former President George W. Bush was heavily criticized for his administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina particularly in New Orleans, where much of the city was left underwater. In its aftermath, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 (PKEMRA), which added safeguards to prevent another botched response.

The letter from FEMA employees warns that the Trump administration is rolling back those protections and calls on Congress to intervene. Their demands include shielding FEMA from “further interference” from the DHS, stopping “illegal impoundments of appropriated funding,” and protecting FEMA workers from “politically motivated firings.”

Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, was already under fire in July over the response to flooding in Texas that left about 135 people dead. Critics blamed a new rule she insisted upon, which required her personal sign-off on any contract or grant over $100,000, which delayed the deployment of an Urban Search and Rescue team by at least three days.

At least two FEMA staffers placed on leave had been part of that Texas flood response, The Washington Post reported.

Jeremy Edwards, a former FEMA press secretary who signed the “FEMA Katrina Declaration,” said the number of signatories “signifies the severity of the problem.”

“They are that scared of us being so inadequately unprepared. It speaks a lot to the situation right now,” Edwards told The Post.

The Trump administration also placed about 140 Environmental Protection Agency employees on leave in July after they signed a letter protesting the agency’s management and the treatment of federal workers.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

Trump Takes Revenge Against FEMA Workers Who Warned He’s Risking Disaster
The staff warned that Trump’s policies were putting lives at risk.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-takes-revenge-against-fema-workers-who-warned-hes-risking-disaster

Daily Beast: Trump Vows MSNBC Host Nicolle Wallace ‘Will Be Fired’ in Truth Social Rampage

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The president responded to a doctored image of Nicolle Wallace with a battle cry to end her career.

President Donald Trump has taken aim at MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace in a bizarre social media rant.

The drama started when 79-year-old Trump kicked off his Sunday morning with a cryptic post on Truth Social.

“Bela,” he wrote, leaving his followers to debate the meaning of the word.

In a reply, one user posted a doctored photo of Wallace with a “Karen” haircut and a red nose alongside the text, “Typhoid Mary Nicole Wallace,” “Clown news,” and “Nicole Wallace is afraid of losing her job. Get her a Waaambulance.” A fake news ticker showed the MSNBC logo alongside the word “misinformation.”

Wallace, who now hosts Deadline: White House on MSNBC, was former White House communications director under President George W. Bush.

“She is a loser, with bad ratings, who was already thrown off of The View,” Trump replied on Sunday. “She will be fired soon! MSNBC IS DEAD!”

The post came after the president shared his disdain for members of the media after he met with President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, where he failed to secure a ceasefire.

Before the meeting on Friday, Trump firmly stated that Putin could expect “severe consequences” if he didn’t agree to end the fighting in Ukraine. But the president has since changed his tune, saying achieving peace will require territorial concessions from Ukraine. He is slated to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday.

“It’s incredible how the Fake News violently distorts the TRUTH when it comes to me,” he raged. “There is NOTHING I can say or do that would lead them to write or report honestly about me. I had a great meeting in Alaska on Biden’s stupid War, a war that should have never happened!!!”

In a second post, Trump added, “If I got Russia to give up Moscow as part of the Deal, the Fake News, and their PARTNER, the Radical Left Democrats, would say I made a terrible mistake and a very bad deal. That’s why they are the FAKE NEWS!”

Such an embarrassing, pathetic fool!

Trump Vows MSNBC Host ‘Will Be Fired’ in Truth Social Rampage
The president responded to a doctored image of Nicolle Wallace with a battle cry to end her career.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-vows-msnbc-host-nicolle-wallace-will-be-fired-in-truth-social-rampage

2 paragraphs: Ret. Marine Fighter Pilot Shocked To See U.S. Airmen on Their Knees in Front of Russian Jet, “Never Thought I’d See That”

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Retired U.S. Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marine Corps, as well as the first to pilot the F/A-18 on a combat mission, responded to the image of airmen fixing a red carpet laid out to welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Alaskan summit with President Donald Trump this week.

McGrath wrote: “I’m sorry but it’s hard to get over the picture of the airmen on their knees, in front of the Russian jet, rolling out the red carpet for a mass murderer. Just never thought I’d see that.”

Matthew VanDyke, founder of Sons of Liberty International, a nonprofit organization that has been providing military training to the Ukrainian military since the Russian invasion in 2022, replied to McGrath: “They certainly don’t make Republicans like they used to.”

Social media influencer and self-described “Democrat for life” Janice Hough also replied to McGrath — with a photo of former President George W. Bush (below). Hough wrote: “This picture SHOULD be as damaging to Trump’s presidency as that picture of George W Bush looking out the window of Air Force One at Katrina damage in New Orleans was to his… Except then we had a real media and a GOP who weren’t all in a cult.”

MAGA supporters are also replying to McGrath with comments including “Well it happens every time, with every president meeting every foreign leader so you should be able to get over it” and “How else do you expect them to roll out the carpet?”

Note: McGrath’s objection didn’t entail questioning the protocol of welcoming foreign leaders, but rather upholding that protocol for “a mass murderer.” In April 2022, two months after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the United Nations reported “that of the 2,343 civilian casualties it had been able to document, it could confirm 92.3% of these deaths were as a result of the actions of the Russian armed forces.”

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) “issued warrants of arrest for two individuals in the context of the situation in Ukraine: Mr. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Ms. Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova.”

Ret. Marine Fighter Pilot Shocked To See U.S. Airmen on Their Knees in Front of Russian Jet, “Never Thought I’d See That”
Retired U.S. Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marine Corps, as well as the first to pilot the F/A-18 on a combat mission, responded to the image of ai
Ret. Marine Fighter Pilot Shocked To See U.S. Airmen on Their Knees in Front of Russian Jet, “Never Thought I’d See That”

Raw Story: Supreme Court used wrong statute to make monumental birthright citizenship ruling: expert

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Conservative legal scholar Jack Goldsmith revealed that the U.S. Supreme Court relied on an incorrectly cited statute to justify its shocking birthright citizen ruling.

Goldsmith, a former United States Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel under the George W. Bush administration, wrote that the decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett contained a key error, as Slate legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern summarized.

“Justice Barrett’s opinion in the universal injunction case rests on an error: For the purposes of historical analysis, she looked at the wrong statute and got the relevant date wrong by nearly *a century,*” wrote Stern on Bluesky Tuesday.

Goldsmith’s analysis looked at 18 interim orders that deal specifically with President Donald Trump’s administration. Notably, he specified that the cases involving a kind of ban on universal injunctions came amid lower courts’ efforts to temporarily pause Trump’s executive orders from going into effect until after they can be litigated.

The ruling in June stated that injunctions should only affect those involved in legal challenges, and shouldn’t be applied over huge swathes of the public.

It specifically referred to injunctions involving challenges to Trump’s attempts to limit birthright citizenship — a Constitutional law that states anybody born in the U.S. is a citizen. It said injunctions could only affect individuals or groups involved in the legal action, not the nation as a whole.

“The Court stated that Section 11 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 ‘endowed federal courts with jurisdiction over ‘all suits . . . in equity,’ and still today . . . ‘is what authorizes the federal courts to issue equitable remedies,'” the article cites the ruling.

However, he noted, it appears the Court didn’t look at the text or context of Section 11 when making its ruling.

“The Court’s claim that equitable remedies are authorized by Section 11 and thus ‘must have a founding-era antecedent’ is novel,'” the article continues, meaning that it’s new or unusual. “It [is] also questionable since Section 11 cannot have authorized equitable remedies in CASA.”

That’s when Goldsmith drops the hammer, saying “Section 11 is a jurisdictional statute” and that the jurisdiction in the CASA case was “based on federal question jurisdiction and suits against the United States. Neither head of jurisdiction is mentioned in Section 11, because neither existed until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. And none of the three heads of subject matter jurisdiction in Section 11 has any legal connection to CASA.”

So, under the Supreme Court’s logic “that jurisdictional statutes authorize equitable remedies, it should have looked to the state of remedies beginning in 1875, when the federal question jurisdiction statute was enacted, not 1789.”

So it seems that Amy Coney Barrett is not much brighter than the fascist who nominated her in 2020.

Supreme Court used wrong statute to make monumental birthright citizenship ruling: expert

https://www.rawstory.com/supreme-court-amy-coney-barrett

MSNBC: The demise of Trump’s lawsuit against Bob Woodward offers a reminder to his other targets

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The demise of the president’s case against the journalist offers a broader lesson about the benefits of fighting back — and the folly of appeasement.

Late Friday, Donald Trump announced a new lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal’s publisher, corporate parent and individual reporters who wrote an article about Jeffrey Epstein that the president didn’t like. The civil suit — which the Republican described as “a POWERHOUSE Lawsuit” for reasons unknown — marked a historical rarity: There’s no modern precedent for a sitting U.S. president suing a newspaper over an article.

But as it turns out, right around the same time that Trump’s lawyers were filing their WSJ case, their client received some related news. NBC News reported:

A federal judge on Friday dismissed President Donald Trump’s nearly $50 million lawsuit against the journalist Bob Woodward for publishing tapes from interviews for his 2020 best-seller ‘Rage’ as an audiobook. The decision by U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe in Manhattan is a victory for Woodward, his publisher Simon & Schuster and its former owner Paramount Global.

In case anyone needs a fresher, it was in early 2023 when the Republican first filed a civil suit against Woodward and his publisher, claiming that the longtime journalist did not get his consent to release audio recordings of their interviews. Trump sought nearly $50 million in damages.

He’ll end up with nothing but legal bills. (The judge in this case was appointed by George W. Bush.)

The outcome was hardly unfamiliar. When Trump sued CNN and demanded $475 million, the case was thrown out; when he sued The Washington Post, the case was thrown out; and when he sued The New York Times, seeking $100 million, the case was thrown out.

In each instance, the Republican and his legal team filed highly dubious, politically motivated cases, each of which was based on claims that can charitably be described as “thin,” and in each instance, the journalists and their employers fought back — and won.

To be sure, there are some notable exceptions. When Trump filed a similarly weak case against ABC News, the network agreed to a controversial $15 million settlement with the president. More recently, in response to a bizarre lawsuit from the president, CBS News’ corporate parent agreed to an even more controversial $16 million settlement.

The broader lessons should be obvious. For one thing, those wildly unnecessary out-of-court settlements only emboldened Trump, effectively encouraging him to sue other news organizations that bothered him for one reason or another. Indeed, the president explicitly referenced the ABC News and CBS News payments when outing his new civil suit against The Wall Street Journal.

For another, the recent pattern suggests the only way to lose in a fight against Trump is to pursue a course rooted in appeasement. It’s true when it comes to law firms; it’s true when it comes to higher education; and it’s true in his court fights against news organizations.

Since Rupert Murdoch is unlikely to roll over and pay bribe money in feasance to King Donald, this will be King Donald’s biggest legal flop yet.

The demise of Trump’s lawsuit against Bob Woodward offers a reminder to his other targets
The demise of the president’s case against the journalist offers a broader lesson about the benefits of fighting back — and the folly of appeasement.

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/demise-trumps-lawsuit-bob-woodward-offers-reminder-targets-rcna219958