“Like Patel, Bondi was confirmed after promising to be guided by the facts and the law rather than the president’s grudges. “The partisanship, the weaponization, will be gone,” she declared. “America will have one tier of justice for all….There will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.”
Blanche sang the same tune during his confirmation hearing. “Politics should never play a role in the Department of Justice,” he said. “We will work to restore the American people’s faith in our justice system.”
Whether or not Bondi and Blanche meant those words when they said them, the president plainly does not share the vision they described. “They’re all guilty as hell,” Trump said in the Truth Social rant addressed to Bondi, which mentioned Adam Schiff, the not-yet-indicted Democratic senator from California (whom Trump also mentioned on Wednesday), along with Comey and James—a list to which he has now added three more names. Guilty of what? The Justice Department’s job, as Trump sees it, is to figure that out.”
How the pentagon is treating reporters is more like how authoritarian governments treat reporters. Yes, we’ll talk to you and give you access, but only to select people who will eat our shit.
“During his second term in office, several major media organizations have settled lawsuits brought by President Donald Trump. The lawsuits have little or no merit, and the settlements clearly seem like payoffs meant to hold off a vengeful president. Now Senate Democrats are investigating whether the settlements amount to bribery.
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Legal or not, it’s completely inappropriate for the sitting president to sue media companies he doesn’t like and use the levers of government to force them to settle. While it may not meet the statutory definition of bribery, lawmakers are right to probe both the administration and the companies Trump has targeted.”
“Federal law says the president of the United States may only call state National Guard members “into Federal service” when certain specific conditions are met, such as when “there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against” the federal government, or when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
According to President Donald Trump, he alone gets to decide when or if such conditions exist. Or, as Trump recently argued in a legal filing to the U.S. Supreme Court, “such decisions are committed to the discretion of the President and are unreviewable” by the federal courts.”
“In her dissent, Judge Susan P. Graber warned that the decision “erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights.” State Attorney General Dan Rayfield criticized the decision, saying that the ruling “sets a dangerous precedent that would allow a president to put Oregon soldiers on our streets with almost no justification.””
Republicans are attacking democracy in multiple ways.
“House Speaker Mike Johnson has been threatened with legal action by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes over his ongoing failure to swear in her state’s new Democratic congresswoman-elect, Adelita Grijalva.
Grijalva, 54, won a special election in Arizona’s 7th congressional district on September 23, comfortably beating Republican Daniel Butierez by picking up 69 percent of the vote to his 29 percent, and will, eventually, succeed her late father, Raul Grijalva, who passed away in March.
In a letter sent to the speaker on Tuesday, Mayes wrote: “Arizona’s right to a full delegation, and the right of the residents of CD 7 to representation from the person they recently voted for, are not up for debate and may not be delayed or used as leverage in negotiations about unrelated legislation.””
“Five years after the city’s fiery 2020 protests, Portland is mostly calm. That hasn’t stopped Trump from reviving old battles, fueled by false memories and made-for-TV outrage.
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there have been rocks and sticks thrown at ICE agents and the shining of lasers into officers’ eyes. According to recent reporting in The Oregonian, there have been 29 arrests during ICE protests this year, 18 of them in June. Still, most nights see a few dozen protesters at most. Comparing this to the 2,000-plus nightly protesters in 2020 is not just apples to oranges; it’s apples to an apple-flavored sugar crystal on an Apple Jack.
This clearly doesn’t matter to Trump, who has shown little to no interest in what’s actually happening, instead relying on historical memory of the city’s fiery days to animate the proposition that “war-ravaged” Portland must be made to heel.”
“Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon on Wednesday rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work, pushing journalists who cover the American military further from the seat of its power. The nation’s leadership called the new rules “common sense” to help regulate a “very disruptive” press.
News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.
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“What they’re really doing, they want to spoon-feed information to the journalist, and that would be their story. That’s not journalism,” said Jack Keane, a retired U.S. Army general and Fox News analyst, said on Hegseth’s former network.
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Youssef said it made no sense to sign on to rules that said reporters should not solicit military officials for information. “To agree to not solicit information is to agree to not be a journalist,” she said. “Our whole goal is soliciting information.””