A Constitutional Clash In Three Acts
In three closely watched anti-immigration cases, the Trump administration continued its slo-mo constitutional defiance of the judicial branch …
Act I: Non-Responsiveness
Act II: Delay Shenanigans
Act III: Misdirection And Mischaracterization
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded immigration agents significantly increase daily arrests to 3,000 in a “tense” meeting last week, according to a report.
Miller, President Donald Trump’s top adviser and architect of the administration’s aggressive immigration policies, and Noem told agents they needed to up daily arrests and deportations during the meeting at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. on May 21, according to Axios.
The figure is approximately triple the number of daily arrests that ICE agents were making at the beginning of the Trump administration, the outlet noted.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger, who took charge of the department in the difficult months after the U.S. Capitol siege, is retiring from his position Friday. After the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, he helped rebuild the department’s shrunken staff, beefed up recruitment efforts and bolstered the agency’s intelligence operations and communications to fix weaknesses revealed by the breach of the Capitol.
…
Manger has been critical of the pardons issued by President Trump to free Capitol rioters who beat, clubbed and gassed Capitol Police and other officers during the attack on the Capitol. He told CBS News that when Mr. Trump issued 1,500 pardons to the suspected and convicted rioters when he took office, it “was probably one of my worst days in this job.”
He also blasted conspiracy theories about Jan. 6 that continue to circulate on social media.
“My folks were here on Jan. 6. They were part of what went on. They were assaulted,” Manger said. “They were in fights. Many of them were injured. They know exactly what happened on Jan. 6. For somebody to make up some story that, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad,’ — it is just not true.”
“What a chilling message to law enforcement, because we’ve got a job to do, and we don’t care what the issue is,” Manger continued. “We don’t care what side of the coin you’re on on any particular issue because we have a job to do, to maintain public order and to keep the peace.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-police-chief-thomas-manger-retires-capitol-riot
The Arlington, VA County Board has limited local police interactions with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by removing Sections 7 and 8 of the county’s “Trust Policy.” This policy change aims to encourage immigrant communities to seek emergency assistance without fear.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/new-policy-delivers-major-blow-to-ice/ss-AA1FE7aX
President Donald Trump on Monday granted an unconditional pardon to a Virginia sheriff who had been convicted of federal bribery charges and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
Scott Jenkins, who had been the sheriff of Culpeper County, Virginia, was set to report to jail on Tuesday.
“Sheriff Scott Jenkins, his wife Patricia, and their family have been dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden DOJ,” Trump wrote in a statement on Truth Social. “In fact, during his trial, when Sheriff Jenkins tried to offer exculpatory evidence to support himself, the Biden Judge, Robert Ballou, refused to allow it, shut him down, and then went on a tirade.”
Birds of feather flock together!
When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.
Thirty-one years later, after dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket — 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice.
The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.
Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.
And Mr. Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in — not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Mr. Trump personally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/us/politics/trump-money-plane-crypto.html
When Donald Trump unveiled a meme coin a few days before his second inaugural, the ethical mess was obvious. The Campaign Legal Center’s Adav Noti explained at the time, “It is literally cashing in on the presidency — creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented.”
But when the president and his partners launched a contest of sorts last month, it took the story to a new level: Those interested in investing in Trump’s meme coin — and by extension, giving the president money — were told they’d have a chance to win special access to Trump and the White House.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said of the scheme, “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a president has ever done. Not close.”
The gambit proved predictably lucrative. NBC News reported this week:
More than 200 wealthy, mostly anonymous crypto buyers are coming to Washington on Thursday to have dinner with President Donald Trump. The price of admission: $55,000 to $37.7 million. That’s how much the 220 winners of a contest to meet Trump spent on his volatile cryptocurrency token, $TRUMP, according to an analysis by the blockchain analytics company Nansen. The top $TRUMP coin holders at a specific time — determined by the dinner’s organizers — secured a seat.
The dinner nevertheless happened at a Trump-owned property in Virginia on Thursday night, and it was described by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes as “the Met Gala of presidential pay-for-play.” Chris added that the dinner was “the most brazen act of corruption by a president in our lifetimes, probably in a century, possibly ever.”
The president’s chief spokesperson was asked, for example, whether Trump was using the gathering to enrich himself. Instead of answering directly, [White House Press Secretary Bimbo #1] Leavitt said the president was re-elected “because he was a successful businessman.” The problem with this, of course, was (a) she didn’t answer the question; (b) he wasn’t a successful businessman; and (c) there’s no evidence to suggest Trump’s private-sector background contributed to his successful 2024 candidacy.
At the same briefing, [Bimbo #1] Leavitt also argued that Trump was attending the crypto dinner in his “personal time,” which made even less sense, given that presidents while in office don’t have the luxury of simply taking off the presidential hat and acting as a private citizen for a while. Ethical norms and legal standards always apply to the nation’s chief executive, especially when interacting with those eager to give them financial rewards.
But I was especially interested in [Bimbo #1]Leavitt’s third point: Trump’s assets, she insisted, are in a “blind trust” managed by his adult sons, which necessarily mitigates potential ethical conflicts.
This almost resembles a credible point, but there’s a problem: Trump’s “trust” isn’t actually “blind.”
When the president’s first term began, many urged the Republican to avoid ethical quandaries by utilizing a blind trust, but Trump refused. After he was elected to a second term, he did transfer assets into a trust controlled by his eldest son, but to call it “blind” is to stretch the definition to an unreasonable degree.
Indeed, The New York Times spoke to Dennis Kelleher, the chief executive of Better Markets, a nonprofit that pushes for more transparency on Wall Street, who emphasized the family connection. “This is not a blind trust with an independent trustee, where people can have confidence that the conflicts of interest are in fact removed,” he explained.
In other words, after having plenty of time to come up with a defense for Trump’s meme coin scheme, the White House came up with a handful of talking points, and all three fell apart rather quickly.
All things considered, that’s not too surprising: Defending the indefensible isn’t easy.
President Donald Trump hosted a dinner at his golf club in Virginia on Thursday evening for the top 220 holders of his personal $TRUMP meme coin. The top 25 in the group of investors participated in a VIP reception with the president.
When a reporter asked White House spokesperson Karoline [Bimbo #1] Leavitt if the list of attendees was going to be made available to the public, she replied, “The president is attending it in his personal time.”
Republican political pundit and Trump critic Tim Miller responded: “Presidents don’t get ‘personal time.’ There’s not like a magic suit you wear when you are doing official business and one where you are just Donald from Queens.”
Former Republican political pundit and Supreme Court attorney George Conway (ex-husband of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign manager Kellyanne Conway) replied to Miller: “Actually, it’s fine. If Trump is saying he’s doing something on his “personal time,” then obviously that means he’s not acting within what the Supreme Court calls “the outer perimeter of his official responsibility,” which, in turn, means he’s not immune from criminal prosecution.”
On Friday morning, longtime Washington D.C. reporters Jonathan Lemire and Peter Baker of the New York Times, as well as conservative columnist Matt Lewis, admitted they were stunned that Republicans turned a blind eye to Donald Trump’s crypto dinner.
During a segment on the president’s much-criticized dinner at his golf club in northern Virginia that took place Thursday night, Lemire prompted guest Baker with, “I mean, you’ve covered the White House for a long time. I mean, I’m almost speechless at this. Could you imagine if Barack Obama or Joe Biden did anything like it?“
“No, we couldn’t, they could –– they never did anything like this,” Baker responded. “It’s not the first presidential family that kind of profited off the White House; you can certainly find other examples of that in history. But the scale of this, the scope of this is so far beyond anything history has ever seen.”
,,,
I don’t think the Democrats yet have the juice to take what is just transparently bribery and make it matter to the American people.”
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-crypto-dinner-almost-speechless
An attempt by White House press secretary Karoline [Bimbo #1] Leavitt to blow off ethical and legal concerns about Donald Trump’s crypto dinner on Thursday night might come back to haunt her boss.
Thursday afternoon [Bimbo #1] Leavitt lectured reporters in the Brady Briefing Room about the dinner which was to include foreign investors at a Donald Trump golf resort in Virginia, telling NBC’s Garrett Haake, “Well, as you know, Garrett, this question has been raised with the president. I have also addressed the dinner tonight. The president is attending it in his personal time. It is not a White House dinner, it’s not taking place here at the White House. But certainly I can raise that question and try to get you an answer for it.”
[Bimbo #1] Leavitt’s claim of “personal time” caught the ear of multiple Trump critics.
On X, The Bulwark’s Tim Miller pointed out, “President’s don’t get ‘personal time.’ There’s not like a magic suit you wear when you are doing official business and one where you are just Donald from Queens.”
Conservative lawyer and ardent Trump opponent George Conway took the next step and suggested, “Actually, it’s fine. If Trump is saying he’s doing something on his ‘personal time,’ then obviously that means he’s not acting within what the Supreme Court calls ‘the outer perimeter of his official responsibility,’ which, in turn, means he’s not immune from criminal prosecution.”
