Insider: Gavin Newsom demanded $787M from Fox News in his defamation lawsuit. The number isn’t a coincidence.

  • Gavin Newsom alleges Fox News defamed him by misrepresenting a call with Trump.
  • He asked for $787 million in damages, echoing the amount Fox News paid to settle Dominion’s lawsuit.
  • Newsom’s lawsuit also cites a defamation suit Trump filed against CBS.

Newsom alleges Fox News defamed him by calling him a liar when he denied speaking with President Donald Trump on June 9.

Around that time, Trump had sent National Guard troops to Los Angeles over Newsom’s objections. Demonstrators had held protests around the city in opposition to the president’s immigration policies.

At a press conference on June 10, Trump said he spoke to Newsom “a day ago.”

In fact, Newsom says, they spoke for 16 minutes around midnight on June 7 Eastern time (or June 6 Pacific time), the day Trump first sent the troops.

Newsom posted phone records on social media showing the timing of their call. But his lawsuit says Fox News host John Roberts misled readers about the timing in his own social media posts, anyway. The lawsuit also says Jesse Watters, a Fox opinion host, falsely called him a liar.

“Why would Newsom lie and claim Trump never called him? Why would he do that?” Watters said, according to the suit.

The chyron on the screen at the time read “Gavin lied about Trump’s call,” the lawsuit says.

https://www.businessinsider.com/gavin-newsom-lawsuit-fox-news-cites-dominion-trump-2025-6

The Nation: The Supreme Court Just Cosigned One of Trump’s Most Lawless Immigration Moves

Deporting people to countries where they might be tortured or killed? All good, according to the six GOP justices.

Deporting people to countries where they might be tortured or killed? All good, according to the six GOP justices.

I always knew that Donald Trump’s unhinged cruelty toward immigrants would find aid and comfort among the Republicans on the Supreme Court. But I held out hope that his brazen violations of lower-court orders might give the Republicans pause before greenlighting Trump’s continued terror campaign against people who didn’t happen to be born here.

On Monday, that small sliver of hope was dashed. The Supreme Court issued a ruling from its emergency docket allowing Trump to send immigrants to third-party countries—even ones where they might be tortured and killed. The Republican order violates this country’s constitutional grant of due process, international human rights laws, literal treaties to which this country is a signatory, and basic human decency. In other words, it was a bog-standard Republican Supreme Court ruling.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/supreme-court-trump-deportations

Newsweek: Donald Trump Suffers Double Deportation Loss In Hours: ‘Irreparable Harm’

Donald Trump’s administration suffered a double legal blow on Friday when the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to lift a judge’s injunction blocking the swift deportation of illegal immigrants to a country other than their own, such as El Salvador or Libya.

Also on Friday, the Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision blocked the administration’s request to resume the rapid deportation of Venezuelan nationals using the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used 1798 law.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-suffers-double-deportation-loss-2073578

Alternet: ‘Taunt the judiciary’: Legal scholars slam ‘invalid’ MAGA lawsuit against John Roberts

On April 22, according to Talking Points Memo (TPM) reporter Josh Kovensky, the America First Legal Foundation filed a “little-known lawsuit” against U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and the head of the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts — accusing the federal courts of undermining his presidential powers.

“The case ostensibly proceeds as a FOIA lawsuit, with the Trump-aligned group seeking access to judiciary records,” Kovensky explains. “But, in doing so, it asks the courts to cede massive power to the White House: the bodies that make court policy and manage the judiciary’s day-to-day operations should be considered independent agencies of the executive branch, the suit argues, giving the president, under the conservative legal movement’s theories, the power to appoint and dismiss people in key roles.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/taunt-the-judiciary-legal-scholars-slam-invalid-maga-lawsuit-against-john-roberts/ar-AA1E3Z7a

Mediaite: Trump Just Handed His Biggest Enemy in Media a Slam Dunk

LOL! After all that whining about Hillary Clinton’s email server!

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

President Donald Trump insisted that information leaked to Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was not classified multiple times during a White House press availability Tuesday afternoon. But his defiant tone may have just backed his administration into a corner of litigious federal investigations, potentially giving one of his most prominent and influential critics a major win.

Pro-Trump media figures have since bent over backwards to try to defend the massive security breach, which could potentially involve crimes, given the law that Trump enacted during his first administration in response to Hillary Clinton’s email server controversy.

Trump Claims Signal Leak Not Classified Could Be Criminal

Robert Reich: Trump’s legal setbacks for the past week

Long read but a good wrap-up for the week:

Today I’m feeling nauseously optimistic. (Nauseous optimism is when your heart aches and you’re sick to your stomach but believe you’ll live to see the dawn.)

Although every other constraint on Trump is gone — congressional Republicans are in the MAGA cult, Democrats are zombies, big business doesn’t dare oppose Trump, and high-tech has gone over to the dark side — one constraint remains: the federal courts.

And the federal courts seem to be holding firm, at least so far.

Consider what the courts did this week:

https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1189986192494826

Huffington Post: Angry Federal Judge Calls Trump’s Action On Migrant Flights ‘Frightening’

Justice Department lawyers once again faced an angry federal judge on Friday as they sought to defend President Donald Trump’s decision to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and usher migrants out of the country without a court hearing. 

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg vowed to determine whether or not the Trump administration knowingly violated his Saturday order to return hundreds of Venezuelan migrants that were, at the time, being flown to an El Salvadoran prison, where they presently remain.

Earlier this week, Trump prompted a rare rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts when he called for Boasberg to be impeached

At the hearing, Boasberg slammed the government’s language in some of its recent court filings as “intemperate and disrespectful,” adding that he could not recall ever encountering such a tone from U.S. government lawyers. One such filing accused the judge of “continuing to beat a dead horse” with his requests for more information from the Justice Department, which only responded in part, alleging that the judge’s orders were “immaterial.”

“I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order, who ordered this and what the consequences will be,” Boasberg said during an approximately 90-minute hearing.

Angry Federal Judge Calls Trump’s Action On Migrant Flights ‘Frightening’