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Former acting U.S. attorney Alina Habba (official portrait by the U.S. Department of Justice).

Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.

Greetings, and welcome to what I’ve dubbed “Judicial Notice Supplement”—or, in homage to the Federal Supplement or F. Supp., “JN Supp.” As I explained in yesterday’s Judicial Notice, JN Supp. is where I’ll share additional material that I couldn’t fit into Judicial Notice proper.

As I do with Judicial Notice, I’ve organized this post with topic-based headlines. The headlines are “linkable”: If you want to email JN to someone and have them focus on a particular section, you can click next to the heading and copy a link that will take the reader directly to the relevant section.

Please note that as I did with yesterday’s Judicial Notice, I’m sticking to news that broke on or before September 27 (which explains why this post and yesterday’s both bear that date). Anything noteworthy from after that date will be considered for this coming weekend’s Judicial Notice.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

Lawyer of the Week: Sheri Mecklenburg.

Besides former assistant U.S. attorney Sheri Mecklenburg (N.D. Ill.), who left the Justice Department after sending out quite the resignation letter, here are other attorneys who were in the news last week:

• I seriously considered California Attorney General Rob Bonta for Lawyer of the Week. He led a coalition of 12 Democratic-led states that settled with Paramount Skydance, allowing its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery to close (assuming judicial approval). Reactions to the resolution varied, as reported by The New York Times: Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Cal.) called it “a practical path forward,” while the advocacy organization Free Press, which opposes media consolidation, dubbed it “weak.” If you have an opinion, share it in the comments.

• It’s official: Nathaniel Cullerton, the Wachtell Lipton litigation partner who was filmed making out with an associate in Central Park, is now a former Wachtell partner. The news was reported by the New York Post, which obtained confirmation from the firm: “Wachtell Lipton and Mr. Cullerton mutually agreed to part ways,” a spokesperson said in a statement. The associate remains at Wachtell. (If you’re wondering how on earth two Wachtell lawyers went viral for a public make-out session—and how internet sleuths (or busybodies) even figured out their identities—check out this Mashable article.)

• My former office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, lost around 50 lawyers last year (as reported by Max Mitchell, Nicholas Malfitano, and Charles Toutant for a two-part series in the New Jersey Law Journal, here and here). Much of the attrition occurred during and after the rocky tenure of former acting U.S. attorney Alina Habba. But Habba, 42, kissed all that goodbye—and now saves her smooches for her new husband, Turkish billionaire Turhan Mildon, 29. The two got married last Saturday at the Waldorf Astoria New York, in a wedding that cost an estimated $10 million. (This is Habba’s third marriage; she was previously married to parking lot magnate Gregg Reuben and New Jersey lawyer Matthew Eyet.)

• Before he was a Connecticut state government official convicted of federal bribery and extortion charges, Konstantinos “Kosta” Diamantis was a lawyer—so presumably he understood that fleeing to Greece ahead of sentencing was not going to improve his legal situation. Yes, Diamantis had surrendered his U.S. passport—but he still had a Greek passport, which authorities believe he used to take a boat to the Bahamas and then fly to London.

• Mariah Medina, a criminal defense attorney in San Antonio, was reprimanded in open court for wearing this dress (click on the tweet to read the entire thread, which details Medina’s interaction with the judge):

Medina’s tweet went viral, with 7.3 million views as of this writing. Some defended her attire—e.g., Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, who declared the garment “lovely and appropriate”—while others opined that Medina should have worn a jacket over the dress.

Readers, what do you think? (In case it affects your view, this took place at a case-management hearing, with no jurors present.)

[UPDATE (5:04 p.m.): The judge who reprimanded Medina, Judge Yolanda Huff of Bexar County, Texas, responded in a statement. Some highlights:

• It wasn’t just the dress; Medina was also wearing tennis shoes and carrying a backpack.

• “In my opinion, she was completely disrespectful to me as the judge and exhibited unprofessional behavior in the courtroom by failing to wear professional attire required during trial proceedings.”

• “I did not, in any way, embarrass her in open court. I spoke very softly and quietly to Ms. Medina—so much so that she had to lean forward to hear me. If you notice in the video, people around us were completely unaware of our conversation.”

• “Ms. Medina made this a public spectacle by posting to social media. Every law student, attorney and Judge are aware of the proper attire for court.”]

In memoriam: Tara Sutton—a longtime partner in the Minneapolis office of Robins Kaplan, where she chaired the national mass-torts practice—passed away at 59 from “a brief illness” (per the firm). May she rest in peace.

Judge of the Week: Judge Timothy Kelly.

In addition to Judge Timothy J. Kelly (D.D.C.) and the temporary restraining order he issued in CNN, Inc. v. Trump, here’s additional news about judges and the judiciary:

• Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are the three justices most often in the majority at the Court. They were also the only three justices who attended last Thursday’s state dinner at the White House honoring Chinese leader Xi Jinping. It’s not clear whether other justices were invited; back in April, all six Republican-appointed justices attended the White House state dinner held in honor of King Charles.

• Judge Thomas Ludington (E.D. Mich.), who pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor drunken-driving charge in April, agreed to remain on paid leave—i.e., off the bench, not hearing cases—until September 1, 2027. If he does return to hearing cases, he will first take senior status. For more details about what Judge Ludington agreed to do to resolve two judicial-misconduct complaints—one filed by Fix the Court executive director Gabe Roth, the other initiated by Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton (6th Cir.)—see this order from Judge Sutton.

• Judicial diva is as judicial diva does? Judge Colleen McMahon—one of the biggest personalities on the S.D.N.Y., a court with no shortage of them—issued a short but scathing order in a discovery dispute (which I won’t bother summarizing; it’s only two pages, so just read it for yourself and enjoy the lulz). Over at Court Watch, Seamus Hughes and Peter Beck wrote, “We’re pretty sure we’d quit lawyering forever if we ever got this order.”

In nominations news, the Senate confirmed Angela Colmenero—most recently, deputy chief of staff to Governor Greg Abbott (R-Tex.), and before that, his principal deputy general counsel—to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

In memoriam: Justice Edward H. Lehner—who served on the New York Supreme Court for more than 20 years, but was most well-known for helping to pass the Empire State’s groundbreaking “pooper scooper” law during his earlier stint as a state legislator—passed away at 93. May he rest in peace.

Ruling of the Week: People Not Politicians v. Onder.

The SCOTUS ruling in the Missouri election-map dispute wasn’t the only significant opinion from last week. Here are other noteworthy decisions and dispositions:

• Elsewhere on the emergency docket, last Friday the justices “cleared the way for the Trump administration to move forward with its plan to use a modified centralized database to verify voters’ citizenship,” per Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog. The majority in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters issued a seven-page, per curiam opinion; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

• Sticking with the interim docket, Justice Kagan declined to involve the Court in a high-profile custody dispute between a surrogate, McKenna West, and the intended parents with whom she had been working, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed. After the baby boy being carried by West was diagnosed with a serious heart problem, Gilkar and Ahmed asked West to get an abortion; she refused, then fled her home state of Alaska for Texas, where she gave birth. The parties have been fighting it out in court ever since. A California court ultimately recognized Gilkar and Ahmed as the boy’s parents; West asked SCOTUS to stay that ruling, but Justice Kagan denied her request.

• In Anthropic PBC v. United States Department of War, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit rejected Anthropic’s challenge to the Trump administration’s designation of the AI giant as a supply-chain risk to U.S. national security. Judge Gregory Katsas wrote the opinion, which was joined by Judge Neomi Rao; Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson dissented.

• Speaking of Judge Rao, she wrote the majority opinion in Mahoney v. United States Capitol Police Board (joined by Judge Henderson), which concluded that a Capitol Police policy prohibiting public demonstrations on the East Steps of the Capitol unless they’re sponsored by a member of Congress is “unconstitutionally overinclusive.” Judge Judith Rogers dissented—in an opinion that was “even more protective of free-speech rights,” as noted by Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein of Politico.

• The Second Circuit denied rehearing en banc in Barbosa da Cunha v. Freden, in which the panel held that detention isn’t mandatory for noncitizens who are apprehended by immigration enforcement in the interior of the United States (as opposed to at the border, where different rules apply). Judge Steven Menashi, joined in part by Judge Michael Park, dissented from that denial. Interestingly enough, Judge Matthew Schwartz, joined by Judge Richard Sullivan, concurred; although they agreed with the substantive analysis of the dissent, they didn’t support full-court rehearing, especially since the Supreme Court is likely to decide the issue soon. (This led the prominent conservative activist Mike Davis to call out Judge Schwartz, a recent Trump appointee: “Stop being weak. Bold and fearless. You’re not a Bush judge.”)

• In KalshiEX LLC v. Schuler, the Sixth Circuit ruled that federal law “neither expressly nor impliedly preempts Ohio’s or Tennessee’s gambling laws.” This deepens a circuit split on who can regulate prediction markets—which I predict will make it onto the Supreme Court’s docket for October Term 2026. The unanimous opinion by Judge Julia Smith Gibbons affirmed a ruling by Judge Sarah Daggett Morrison (S.D. Ohio) and vacated one by Judge Aleta Arthur Trauger (M.D. Tenn.), reflecting how split lower courts are on this issue.

• In Red Wine & Blue v. LaRosa, the Sixth Circuit reinstated an Ohio law requiring residents to present documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote at the state’s motor vehicle offices. Judges John Nalbandian and Whitney Hermandorfer formed the majority, while Judge Kevin Ritz dissented.

• In Yukutake v. Lopez, the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, ruled 6-5 that “Hawaii’s shall-issue regime [for firearms regulation] comports with the Second Amendment.” Judge John Owens wrote the majority opinion, while Judges Ryan Nelson, Daniel Bress, Lawrence VanDyke, Danielle Forrest, and Bridget Bade all penned or joined dissents.

• File United States v. Primrose under “chutzpah.” From John Ross of Short Circuit: “Honestly, kudos to this guy who told the Ninth Circuit that using a stolen identity for over 30 years should constitute ‘adverse possession’ rather than identity theft. The case comes out the way you’d expect, but still: Way to go down swinging—or, y’know, identity-thieving.” (No, seriously: as set forth in Judge Forrest’s opinion, Walter Glenn Primrose—yes, that’s his real name—argues that “[t]here should come a time when a person who has lived under an assumed name has earned the right to that name and identity.”)

• Turning to the trial courts, a New Mexico jury found Meta Platforms liable for more than 43 million violations of state law, arising out of allegedly misleading statements about the company’s privacy practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. At $5,000 per violation, this could in theory add up to $219 billion—although whether anything remotely approaching that figure could survive post-trial proceedings is another question. I expect a negotiated resolution: New Mexico was one of three states that didn’t join last month’s $18 billion settlement of litigation brought by the AGs of 47 states, who alleged that the social-media giant designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children and teens—and violated state and federal law in the process.

• In a 63-page opinion in Trump v. Selzer, Iowa District Court Judge Scott Beattie dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer, arising out of a poll published before the 2024 election that showed Trump trailing Kamala Harris. Bob Corn-Revere of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which represented Selzer, told The Times, “This lawsuit was laughable from the beginning and never should have been brought.”

Litigation of the Week: U.S. Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D.

In other litigation news:

• Could saving humanity from our AI overlords… violate the Sherman Act? The plaintiffs in Buist v. Anthropic, PBC allege that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google all agreed “to slow the pace at which each company improves the competing products it sells to consumers”—and “[a]n agreement among competitors to reduce the quality of their products and the rate at which those products improve” is a classic antitrust violation. For more on this issue, see this WIRED article, “The AI ‘Slowdown’ Is an Antitrust Mess,” by Maddy Varner (a former technologist for the Federal Trade Commission). I’m not huge on regulation as a general matter, but I tend to agree with Professor Cass Sunstein’s view that while “[i]nnovation should not be squelched,” the serious risks posed by AI require some amount of regulation—and perhaps one underappreciated benefit of a regulatory framework is that it could give AI companies clearer protection against antitrust claims arising from safety measures requiring some degree of industry-wide coordination.

• Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a shareholder lawsuit against The Times, alleging that the board of directors’ lack of oversight of the outlet’s editorial practices is hurting state pension holders that own stock in the company.

• Our household orders far too much food through delivery apps (even after moving from New York City to the suburbs), so it stuck with me when I read an article in the Washington Post quoting a delivery-worker advocate recommending Grubhub over DoorDash and Uber Eats, on the ground that Grubhub treats workers better. I remembered this piece when I read about a $131.5 million settlement between DoorDash and NYC, resolving claims that DoorDash underpaid or failed to pay 264,000 delivery workers.

• An anonymous woman who claimed in court papers that Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) had raped her when she was 13 has recanted her allegation—and now claims that her lawyers at the time filed her case against Carter “without conducting any independent investigation, background inquiry, or due diligence, and without obtaining any corroboration of the allegations.”

Deal of the Week: Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The Deal of the Week was Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. But it’s important to remember that not all major transactions are M&A matters.

Last Thursday, Anthropic and Akamai Technologies announced a deal in which Anthropic will pay Akamai at least $11.6 billion to use its cloud infrastructure and software over seven years. Akamai is represented by a Freshfields team led by partners Ethan Klingsberg and Taryn Zucker.

Law Firm of the Week: Paul Weiss.

Over the past year, Paul Weiss has been experiencing major change. But it’s far from the only law firm in the headlines these days. Here are some others:

• Two Biglaw firms that are winning in the lateral-hiring war are Gibson Dunn and Sidley Austin. For a deep dive into what they’re up to, including data, see this Law.com piece by Dan Roe and Melina Block, “Unpacking the Ambitions of Sidley and Gibson Dunn.”

• Which firms are the go-to shops for the Republican National Committee this midterm cycle? The top three are Consovoy McCarthy, Jones Day, and Dhillon Law Group, according to the latest Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.

• Seyfarth Shaw LLP was hit with a proposed class-action lawsuit for allegedly failing to protect the personal information of more than 56,000 people that was exposed in an August data breach.

• Duane Morris settled a lawsuit brought by former employment-law partner Meagan Garland, in which she alleged that the firm “unlawfully classifies its non-equity partners as ‘partners’ and business owners of the Firm for taxation and employment purposes, when in fact these non-equity partners are employees who misleadingly bear the title of ‘partner.’” The parties are still working out the specific terms, per Reuters.

• Speaking of Reuters, Sara Randazzo’s latest column looks at how Gunderson Dettmer, a top firm serving the tech sector, is training its lawyers on winning business in the age of AI.

• Uplift Investors, a Connecticut-based PE firm, signed its sixth deal ​to invest in a law firm’s back-office operations ‌through a management services organization—this time with Rainwater Holt & Sexton, an Arkansas-based personal injury firm.

Move of the Week: Weil Gotshal rehiring Peter Feist from Cravath and Debra Sinclair from Willkie Farr.

In addition to the hires discussed in Judicial Notice—including Paul Weiss hiring Christopher Machera from Weil, and Weil welcoming back Peter Feist and Debra Sinclair—here are other notable moves that were announced last week:

• In New York, Vinson & Elkins hired two finance partners, Loren Finegold and Ed Comber, from Latham & Watkins—and Finegold will lead V&E’s structured-finance and securitization practice.

• Speaking of Latham, the firm picked up Greg Van Houten, a commercial litigator who represents corporate policyholders in high-stakes insurance coverage disputes, from Haynes Boone in Washington, D.C.

• Sticking with litigators, Quinn Emanuel hired trial lawyer Sean Suber from Winston Taylor in Chicago. Meanwhile, Alston & Bird added Devin Donohue in Century City, Andy Hutchison in San Francisco, and Sandhya “Sandy” Brown in D.C. (where Brown spent 20 years at the FTC).

• Speaking of lawyers with valuable government experience, former associate deputy attorney general Paul Perkins joined the D.C. office of Morrison Foerster. He’s now a partner in the investigations and white-collar defense group, as well as chair of MoFo’s False Claims Act practice.

• O’Melveny & Myers hired bankruptcy and restructuring partner Penelope Jensen in New York.

Still with me? If you’ve read this far, congratulations: you’re a hard-core reader of Original Jurisdiction and Judicial Notice.

So you’re precisely the people I want to take my poll about my little experiment with “JN Supp.” Would you prefer one big news roundup, published on Sunday or Monday, or two somewhat smaller ones, delivered to you on consecutive days (starting on either Sunday or Monday)?

Thanks for reading Original Jurisdiction, and thanks to my paid subscribers for making this publication possible. Subscribers get (1) access to Judicial Notice, my time-saving weekly roundup of the most notable news in the legal world; (2) additional stories reserved for paid subscribers; and (3) the ability to comment on posts. You can email me at davidlat@substack.com with questions or comments, and you can share this post or subscribe using the buttons below.

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President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Monday to slam what he called a "fake" Axios story about him offering up sanctions relief and currently frozen funds to Iran in exchange for promises on their nuclear program.

"This is untrue. I offered them NOTHING," Trump wrote on Truth Social, responding to ​an Axios report that cited US officials as saying that ​he was willing to give Iran sanctions relief and ⁠release Iranian frozen funds in return for "concrete" Iranian steps regarding ​the nuclear program.

President Trump is willing to give Iran sanctions relief and release Iranian frozen funds in return for concrete Iranian steps regarding the nuclear program, U.S. officials say.

The Labour leader has set out his plans with passion and ambition, but the story he tells lacks a vital chapter on managing global chaos

Andy Burnham is at home at Labour conference, and not only because it is in Liverpool and he has Merseyside roots. The prime minister is native to his political tribe wherever it gathers. He is fluent in its sentimental vocabulary and indigenous to its folk traditions.

Keir Starmer had solid Labour bona fides. He joined the party as a teenager. His parents named him after Keir Hardie. But he didn’t have Burnham’s knack for turning those red-team credentials into an emotional connection.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Let’s start this off by clearing the air: Stephen Miller looks exactly like the sort of person who wants to elevate white people above everyone else. Sure, he doesn’t have the Hitler ‘stache or a blond pompadour, but he’s the same bit of unspectacular “whiteness” Hitler was. Miller is bald, mostly chinless, and looks like someone who’s been banned from both Venmo and Uber for being way too violently creepy. Bro looks like he’d ask Pat Sajak if he could buy a jowl.

But we’re not here to insult Stephen Miller’s looks. I mean, we did do a bit of that but that’s not the larger, more salient point. Miller’s proximity to the president — and more importantly, to Trump’s vague goals of making the country more “white” and more less-white people dead/disappeared/hunted — has generated the onslaught that similarly generated the kind of things no MAGA shitheel would utter publicly: violence against white citizens who have chosen to defend migrants against ICE’s kidnapping squads.

Whatever killing the government can’t get done in the streets, it can (non-verbally) ask other countries to do on their behalf. After shuttling arrestees from detention center to detention center ahead of court filings, these migrants are then violently ejected from the country. That’s not a phrase I’m using lightly. This administration has made a concerted effort to secure agreements with various hellholes around the world in order to inflict as much misery as possible to people it doesn’t even consider to be human beings.

And that’s where Stephen Miller has been so instrumental. DHS and ICE encourage voluntary “deportation,” promising migrants tens or hundreds of dollars for leaving the country of their own free will and volition. (This is also a lie, but what else did you expect?) For those swept up in ICE purges that most frequently target areas bereft of Trump voters, the alternative is much worse. If you don’t end up in El Salvador’s worst prison, you’ll likely be dumped in whatever war-torn, human-rights-violating country that will have you, especially in exchange for federal payments they’d be otherwise banned from receiving.

The New Republic, building on earlier reporting from the Washington Post, expounds on just what a horrific human being White House advisor Stephen Miller is.

Relying on a series of leaked documents, the Post reports that at Stephen Miller’s direction, the agency is effectively paying out huge sums of taxpayer money to some really nasty governments in exchange for their acceptance of third-country deportees who, for various reasons, cannot be returned to their countries of origin.

It’s really sleazy, ghoulish stuff. The administration has authorized or pledged over $400 million for such agreements with more than 30 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America. As the Post reports, the deals place many migrants in countries to which they have no previous connections, and are structured to skirt “human rights safeguards” that typically are built into U.S. foreign assistance payments abroad.

Any normal administration that just wanted to toughen up migration law enforcement would round up migrants and ship them back to the countries they came from. That’s simply not painful enough for this administration, especially when it’s allowing Stephen “Please, My Father Is Mr. Ghoul” Miller to be the brass knuckles he wished to see in the (anti-migrant) world.

Instead, the White House is actively seeking agreements with some of the worst countries in the world to engage in some perverse form of “revenge” against migrants. In many cases, the migrants being subjected to this Trump-specific cruelty aren’t criminals. They’re just people who’ve recently seen their protected status unilaterally revoked, their still-valid visas stripped, or their attempts to abide by the legal naturalization process preemptively terminated by a government that just wants to see as many non-white people ejected/destroyed as possible.

To reiterate: this administration, under the “advisement” of Stephen Miller, is seeking to inflict maximum pain on people who desired nothing more than to live a life free of violence and persecution. The message being sent now is the opposite: “Get fucked for trying, non-whites. Smooches, the US Government.”

The truly vile kicker here? Also at Miller’s direction, this agency is turning the original purpose of the State Department’s refugee architecture on its head. The Office of Remigration is a part of the department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which has historically been devoted to resettling people fleeing horrors abroad in the United States.

But now, civil servants who previously carried out that mission are leaking to the Post their dismay at being ordered to do the opposite. They’re now working to get other countries to agree to accept deportees who have no ties whatsoever to their new destinations, even as we pay these countries foreign assistance money to do so. 

Are you happy with your representation? I direct that question to the MAGA faithful as well — people who seem to believe the USA is the best country ever, but only if no one desiring access to our level of freedoms ever dares to seek asylum here. And by “no one,” we’re not counting white South Africans, who are, of course, free to take our jobs and leech off of our social services and fuck with the purity of our fluids.

Miller and the people who listen to him are exactly who we think they are: Nazis who don’t have the strength of character to actually own it.

So “remigrations” are understood as part of a civilizational rescue mission of sorts: Masses of human civilizational contaminants are rounded up, expelled from the West, and dumped outside our charmed hemisphere, into that geographic mass that Trump calls “shithole countries,” which is of course where they belong. If this is terrifying, so much the better. It’s all rooted in a series of delusions, not least delusions of world-historical grandeur.

The DHS and its agencies continue to make transparently false claims about ridding this nation of the “worst of the worst.” Trump continues to just be casually racist on the regular. Stephen Miller lurks behind the curtain, touching himself furtively as all of his white nationalist dreams become reality. Being exposed won’t change his Nazi tendencies, though. All it’s likely to do is provoke him to double-down on his blatant hatred.

As the fallout from the Iran conflict continues, the price of diesel has soared to record highs in the UK, Europe and US. With his country facing an increase of 70% in costs compared with this time last year, Donald Trump is threatening a ban on US diesel exports to keep costs low for American consumers. But the plans have been met with alarm – the UK is holding talks with US counterparts to try to block the move, which France says would be ‘catastrophic’ if introduced. Lucy Hough speaks to energy correspondent Jillian Ambrose – watch on YouTube

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As the fallout from the Iran conflict continues, the price of diesel has soared to record highs in the UK, Europe and US. With his country facing an increase of 70% in costs compared with this time last year, Donald Trump is threatening a ban on US diesel exports to keep costs low for American consumers. But the plans have been met with alarm – the UK is holding talks with US counterparts to try to block the move, which France says would be ‘catastrophic’ if introduced. Lucy Hough speaks to energy correspondent Jillian Ambrose – watch on YouTube

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With the midterms looming, and after the Epstein files and the war on Iran, Trump superfans are losing faith in their lame duck president

It took a dead child sex offender and a disastrous war to do it, but it looks as though the Maga faithful are slowly beginning to lose confidence in dear leader. As Donald Trump’s approval ratings drop to record lows, some of his most fervent supporters are turning on him.

See, as exhibit one, Trisha Hope, who was once a proud member of the Front Row Joes, a group of Trump superfans who follow the president to rallies around the country. They have custom-made T-shirts! They have branded baseball caps! They even have the attention of Trump himself, who frequently shouts out the group. He did once accidentally call them the “front row Jacks and Joes”, but who can expect a man of his calibre to pay attention to the plebs, eh?

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Kimberly Guilfoyle was a long way from Mar-a-Lago. The U.S. ambassador to Greece—Donald Trump Jr.'s former fiancée—was shuttling back and forth to Bulgaria's capital on a mission this spring. The Trump administration wanted allies on Europe's eastern edge to buy billions of dollars of American natural gas.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr who was appointed to the post last year, was reported by the Wall Street Journal to have alluded to the impending collapse of the Romanian government during an exchange with Greek energy minister Stavros Papastavrou. "We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here," she said, according to the WSJ, to which Papastavrou retorted that the US could not replace Greece's democratically elected government.

Kimberly Guilfoyle has too long been treated merely as a shadow of the men in her life—but she's actually a formidable villain in her own right. From 2001 to 2007, she was married to Gavin Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco. From 2018 to 2024, she was affianced to Donald Trump Jr., which when he started being photographed in the company of another woman, the Palm Beach jet-setter Bettina Anderson, whom he married this year.

Mike Lee objected to the safeguard against the demolition of any presidential memorial Congress designates

• US politics live – latest updates

A Republican senator has blocked a bipartisan bill that would have prevented Donald Trump from demolishing the Kennedy Center without the approval of Congress.

Mike Lee, of Utah, objected on Monday night when the Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley asked the Senate to pass the Protecting Presidential Memorials Act by unanimous consent. The bill, co-written with the Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski, would have banned the demolition of any presidential memorial designated by Congress, including the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, unless lawmakers explicitly approved it.

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It marks another ratcheting up of Trump’s trade war and affects nearly $1bn in imports of a $880bn trade relationship

US-Canada relations, already tense, are likely to deteriorate further after the United States went ahead early on Tuesday with a decision to ban nearly $1bn worth of Canadian imports, including alcoholic beverages, dairy products and motorcycles.

The ban amounts to barely a ripple in $880bn worth of annual two-way trade between the two northern neighbors. But it marks another ratcheting up of Donald Trump’s second-term trade war with the US’s longtime ally and trading partner.

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In the piece Dave Willner and I published last week about why “the apocalypse won’t be sexy,” we discussed how the real threat wasn’t “rogue” out of control AI tools, but rather humans doing stupid shit, sometimes because they stop thinking in the presence of these AI machines. A deeply reported Bloomberg article by Ben Bartenstein and Krishna Karra details how the now infamous bombing of an Iranian girls elementary school was due to Pentagon officials deep over-reliance on Palantir’s Maven system.

Inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.

In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus. Several former senior US military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments.

To understand how we got here, you need a timeline that stretches back the better part of a decade. Project Maven was, somewhat famously, a project to use AI in the Pentagon, that Google was originally tapped to build. However, in 2018, due in large part to employee protests, Google announced it would drop the contract. Days later, Google announced that it would not allow its AI to be used for “weaponized systems.”

Around that time, I was asked to be on a panel debating whether or not it was good for employees to protest contracts like this with one of Palantir’s founders. Little did I know that the reason that founder was so vehement in his contempt for the Google employees protesting was because, right at that moment, Palantir was swooping in to grab the contract that Google was dropping.

Secretive data analytics company Palantir is working on Project Maven, the US Department of Defense program that Google dropped in March following protests inside of the company, according to people familiar with the project.

That takes us to earlier this year, when Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth kicked off their disastrous, stupid, and short-sighted war in Iran with an initial bombing campaign that (among other things) blew up a girls elementary school, killing at least 100 girls (later reports put the toll at more than 165, most of them children). While Hegseth and Trump tried to pretend it wasn’t them or that it wasn’t a school, the evidence piled up pretty quickly.

At almost the exact same time, the Pentagon got into its (now deemed unconstitutional) petty spat with Anthropic, which included some debate about whether or not the Defense Department could get around Anthropic’s guardrails against using its AI for autonomous weaponry. Not surprisingly, this resulted in plenty of speculation about whether or not the bombing of the Shajare Tayyiba Elementary School was due to an AI failure. Reports noted that the site used to be a military compound, but satellite imagery by 2017 had showed the outdoor play area, and intelligence analysts should have removed it from any target list. Hell, the school was apparently clearly labeled… on Google Maps.

Days later, Semafor (a publication with a history of platforming credulous takes regarding the Trump admin) insisted it had the scoop: US officials told it that AI had nothing to do with the bombing.

The error was one that AI would not be likely to make: US officials failed to recognize subtle changes in satellite imagery, while human intelligence analysts missed publicly available information about a school located inside the Revolutionary Guard compound (or failed to add it to the database used for targeting). AI has its notorious failings, from hallucinations to sycophancy, but it’s also able to take in far more information than current, human-led systems — and a deeper look at satellite imagery or, simply, an internet search could have forestalled the disaster. Even a scan of Iranian business listings turned up the school, according to Reuters.

That article discusses Palantir’s Maven — calling it “a kind of DoorDash for deadly missile strikes” — but then suggests it wasn’t really involved in this process:

The tragedy at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school led to an immediate rush to blame AI for the fatal missile attack. And while the initial speculation turned out to be wrong, it does suggest that civilian deaths stemming from automation will be viewed differently than those caused by humans, even if autonomous weapons prove safer in the aggregate.

Except, the Bloomberg report suggests, Palantir’s Maven was definitely involved in the process, even if human stupidity (naturally) made the final calls.

Basically, the Bloomberg report details that people at the Pentagon assumed (incorrectly, obviously) that Palantir’s Maven would magically alert them “hey, this might be a school.” But that’s not how it works. Then again, why would anyone expect a system sold as “intelligent” to apply any actual intelligence to vetting potential targets?

Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It’s not clear why they had such expectations.

Yeah, okay, maybe “it’s not clear why” people expected it, but really? It kinda is, isn’t it? Palantir and all the AI companies play up the “smarts” of their systems and it leads people into a false reliance on them as all-knowing, all-seeing beings, rather than just automation machines that can handle fuzzy inputs and outputs better than old deterministic systems.

Of course, the fact that it was humans who over-relied on Maven lets Palantir wash its hands of the whole thing and yell “not our fault” as loudly as it can:

A Palantir spokesperson said that the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there’s no evidence that its software was at fault in the Minab strike.

Yes, the human is responsible. But people over-relying on the tech because you oversold it is kinda part of the issue, just as Elon Musk overselling the safety of his “full self driving” feature needs to fall partly on Tesla.

And here, even though there were “humans in the loop,” it seems clear that in their rush to find places to bomb, they were perfectly happy to let Palantir’s Maven do the actual work:

High on Centcom’s list: the naval division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most powerful force across the country’s military, economy and politics. It’s tasked with defending — and at times, disrupting — the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz. The Minab school site — with its uncorrected classification as an IRGC facility — was fed into Maven along with other potential targets. It ultimately emerged as one of the recommended day-one targets, people involved in the investigation said.

As all targets do, the Minab site moved through a multi-stage assessment process known by the military as the “kill chain.” Steps in that process have traditionally involved intelligence analysts, imagery specialists, targeteers, lawyers, operational commanders and launch crews, according to US military doctrine and interviews with current and former defense officials. Today, Maven sits at the heart of those operations — between the initial intelligence inputs and the latter review stages, officials said.

Part of that “kill chain” process was supposed to include the “civilian harm mitigation” (CHM) team to carefully review the target to see if there were risks of civilian harm and (you guessed it), how to mitigate that. But, you know, Hegseth finds “CHM” to be way too woke, and got rid of most of them in his quest to make sure he seemed as manly and bloodthirsty as possible. And, besides, they had Palantir’s Maven AI to do the hard work? Who needs a CHM team when Maven can do it…

In past conflicts, preparing lists of proposed targets — work that includes assessing how they align with an operation’s objectives — had taken hours for staffers to complete. Ahead of the US attack on Iran, much of that work was condensed into several minutes via Maven, people involved in the Pentagon’s internal review said.

Officials involved in the investigation pointed to gaps that they said were left after Hegseth dismantled most of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation, or CHM, units — cutting headcount across a number of teams by roughly 90% to fewer than 20 staff members, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Centcom’s team was reduced from 10 to 1.

No CHM team member reviewed the Minab site before the strike, according to officials involved in the internal investigation. That was a consequence of the cuts in staffing but also a decision not to involve the group in planning and operations, the officials said.

So, no, Palantir’s AI didn’t make the decision… but it sure did make Hegseth and Centcom feel pretty confident that they could rush the kill chain process and skip the CHM part which, you know, might have caught the pastel painted walls around the school, the soccer pitch, and the playground markings.

There’s a lot more in the article detailing how the bombing came about, how Hegseth’s obsession with killing off programs he deemed to be too woke, and prioritizing speed and “lethality” all contributed to what is pretty clearly a war crime. But in the end, the point that Dave and I made in our piece earlier this week stands. The apocalypse won’t be sexy. It’ll look like overconfident people skipping the boring checks because they assumed the fancy AI system had already done them for them.

After the risk of a destabilizing US diesel export ban appeared to pass late last week, it returned with a bang on Sunday evening after President Trump said he is still looking "very seriously" at implementing a US ban on diesel exports to combat high prices, even as others in his administration continue to focus on other possible steps. "That can oftentimes lead to a little bit of an increase on gasoline for cars, so we're looking at it very seriously — we may do it," Trump told a Fox News reporter Sunday while attending the Presidents Cup golf tournament final near Chicago.

More than 25,000 people have been deported to 29 countries under ⁠the policy implemented last year, according to a tally by human rights groups

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For some context, it’s worth remembering that Smith had a two-volume report of his findings as a result of his criminal investigations – that resulted in two indictments against the president after his first term. The first focused on Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, while the second on the president’s retention of classified documents.

However, in February, a Trump-appointed federal judge permanently barred the justice department from releasing the second volume of Smith’s report.

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These men in Maine, Georgia and Florida shared no ties – until they became casualties in the latest phase of Trump’s anti-immigration campaign

• Gone in 90 seconds: an ‘invisibilized’ ICE is arresting more people than ever

It was 7am on 13 July this year. A warm, sunny morning, as residents of Biddeford, Maine, left their homes, got into their cars and began their commute. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero came out of the apartment he lived in with his partner and daughter and drove off in his white car. Minutes later, neighbors heard three pops. Durán Guerrero was dead.

More than 1,200 miles (1,900km) away in Ocilla, Georgia, Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva was shuffled on to a bus. Private sector guards and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were beginning the process of transferring him and several other immigrants from one detention center to another nearly two hours away. Ten minutes into the ride, he became unconscious. Doctors at a nearby hospital pronounced him dead.

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Republicans could lean on congressional procedure to defy the will of voters. But if they try that, the Senate has a clear way to fight back

Having lost his mail-in ballot case, Donald Trump will probably resort to ever more extreme ways to try to hold a Republican Congress in November’s elections.

His last-ditch effort to count Joe Biden out in 2020 was for Republicans to “investigate” states Biden narrowly won; proclaim fabricated allegations of “stolen elections” to be true; and then reassign those states’ electoral votes to Trump. I have previously described how that same playbook could be used to try to steal the midterms if a Democratic margin of victory in the House is relatively narrow.

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Notice of Attorney Appearance - USA

The Trump administration finalized new fuel economy standards Monday that it says end a Biden-era push to steer automakers toward electric vehicles.

New mandate requires average of 34.5 miles a gallon by model year 2031, down from Biden administration's 50.4 miles a gallon standard

The Trump administration on Monday released new fuel economy standards that relax regulatory requirements for automakers to control pollution from gasoline-powered cars and light trucks.

President says plant will be built by Indian-owned company and calls it largest such facility in American history

Donald Trump on Monday announced what he called the largest steel plant in American history to be built in Iowa, giving Republicans a jobs message to take to voters in a state that could help decide control of the Senate in November.

“Using advanced steelmaking technology, the plant will produce some of the highest quality, most affordable steel anywhere in the world,” Trump said in the Oval Office, flanked by Iowa’s top Republicans.

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Andrew Bailey will resign as FBI co-deputy director about a year after assuming the position

Andrew Bailey, a deputy director of the FBI who has been overseeing some of Trump’s election-related investigations, will step down from his position approximately one year after assuming his role.

“I am announcing that I am stepping down to return to my family in Missouri,” Bailey wrote in an X post on Monday amid an ongoing shake-up at the bureau.

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Sending migrants to countries they do not come from can have deadly consequences and must be halted, says report

The deportation of thousands of migrants from the US to third countries has set off a “cascade of human rights violations” that could have “deadly” consequences, two dozen UN human rights experts have warned.

Since Donald Trump returned to power in 2025, the US government has been offering millions of dollars to foreign governments to take in migrants, including refugees and asylum seekers, with no ties to their countries. Deals have been struck with 35 nations, nearly a third of them in Africa.

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Democratic lawmakers and critics of President Donald Trump are sounding the alarm over his new ad that says its anti-socialist message ahead of the midterm elections was paid for by the U.S. government. "This may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said, citing the U.S. Code. "It is a Hatch Act violation for any government employees who worked on it or used government resources to make it. It is blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions proscribing the use of government resources for political campaigns."...

A new taxpayer-funded television spot aired by President Donald Trump's administration over the weekend appeared to rehash one of the president's 2024 campaign ads where he calls for a "final battle" against "globalists" and "warmongers," despite bipartisan criticism over what the White House insists are "public service announcements."...

President Donald Trump declares that "this is the final battle" in one of several taxpayer-funded television ads airing ahead of November's midterm elections, prompting bipartisan scrutiny over whether the spots violate federal law. The 30-second ad is a black-and-white video of Trump walking down a hall over audio of his warnings against "the deep state," "warmongers," "globalists," "Marxists," "communists," and "fascists."...

Environmentalists decry move that relaxes requirements on automakers to control pollution from gas-powered cars

The Trump administration on Monday announced it was slashing clean car rules that had been aimed at reducing planet-heating emissions and boosting electric vehicles.

The move, which was criticized by environmentalists, relaxes requirements on automakers to control pollution from gasoline-powered cars and light trucks for model years 2022 through 2031.

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Leo XIV delivered a lengthy tribute on Monday to efforts to unify and democratize Europe since World War II, in what experts saw as a sweeping riposte to the Trump administration's characterization of a continent facing "civilizational erasure."

Each year, Congress passes laws which allocate money to the federal government's various programs and agencies. Trump, for the second year in a row, is refusing to send some of that money to the places that Congress says it has to go, setting off a fresh battle with lawmakers over who controls federal spending. Of the $810 million being withheld, $567 million comes from programs that "provided services to refugees, asylees, and other non-citizens," according to a memo from the White House.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said on Sunday that living public officials should not have buildings named after them and proposed a rule to prohibit such renaming efforts. This comes as President Donald Trump continues to push to rename the Kennedy Center after himself. The president has also sought to rename other prominent federal buildings in Washington, D.C., after himself since returning to the White House last year.

The Trump administration has rolled back car fuel efficiency standards requiring automakers to ensure their products were using less fuel. While the Biden-era standards would have been expected to get the nation's car fleet to average 50.4 miles per gallon by 2031, the Trump administration on Monday brought that number down to 34.9 miles per gallon.

In early March, as President Trump basked in the success of a military intervention in Venezuela, he joined Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the West Wing for a private celebration. A businessman also attended, and brought along a pile of gold. The president looked approvingly at the 10 Venezuelan gold bars stacked in the Roosevelt Room, across from the Oval Office, White House officials recalled. Aides took photos and joked about keeping the gold.

The U.S. and Chinese governments unveiled $30 billion each worth of products subject to lower tariffs, after President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met last week in Washington, D.C., according to the White House. Chinese products subject to lower tariffs under the new "30-by-30" framework include fireworks, kitchenware, flashlights, baseballs and softballs and fishhooks, as specified by a list of imports the White House released...

Despite everything, I sometimes find it hard not to sympathize with Donald Trump. Like Trump, I also chose to make the site of a future climate catastrophe my permanent home. Like Trump, I live in a home more than a century old and spend each day disgusted with the handiwork of the previous inhabitants. Like Trump, I'm fighting a losing battle against decay...

The extent to which Donald Trump is or will become a lame duck president is about to consume Washington.

The CNN bureau at 820 First Street N.E. in Washington, D.C. (photo by David Lat).

This week’s Judicial Notice is sponsored by

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To my readers in the northeast, I hope that you and your families held up well during last weekend’s Nor’easter. It’s still raining in our neck of the woods in New Jersey, but it appears that the worst of the storm is behind us (knock on wood).

Zach and I missed most of it. Leaving our sons with their grandparents (a win-win-win situation), we headed out to Portland, Oregon—and enjoyed beautiful weather while attending a celebration and law clerk reunion in honor of Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain’s 40th anniversary as a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

I had the pleasure and privilege of clerking for “DFO” in the 1999-2000 judicial year, and it was one of the very best experiences of both my professional and personal life. The reunion proceedings were off the record, so further affiant sayeth naught. But I would be remiss if I didn’t congratulate Judge O’Scannlain on four decades of judicial service—and thank him for his guidance, mentorship, and friendship over the years.

Every now and then in Judicial Notice, I provide some piece of practical advice. My latest tip relates to home maintenance, a topic about which Zach and I were blissfully ignorant when we moved from a Manhattan apartment to a suburban house in 2021. We didn’t know, for example, that you need to clean your dryer vents—until our dryer stopped working. And it could have been worse: clogged dryer vents can cause fires. So here’s my tip: clean your dryer vent (or hire someone to do it, which is what we did—a company called Duct Dudes). For more about how and why to clean your dryer vent, see Consumer Reports.

Now, on to the news. I apologize for publishing on Monday morning rather than the usual Sunday afternoon or evening, a result of attending the reunion and spending much of Sunday traveling home from Portland.

I’m also trying something different this week in terms of format. Because of the ridiculously packed news cycle, Judicial Notice has been running long as of late. So I’m breaking it up into this first installment, featuring the “winners” in each category—Lawyer of the Week, Judge of the Week, etc. I’ll follow it with what I’ll call “Judicial Notice Supp.” (an homage to the Federal Supplement aka F. Supp.), which will contain all the additional material that typically appears under each heading. I welcome your thoughts on which format you prefer, this new one or the traditional one.

(Confession: I’m also trying this out because I’m pressed for time, and I want to get at least some portion of Judicial Notice out before 9 a.m. on Monday….)

Lawyer of the Week: Sheri Mecklenburg.

Last fall, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros (N.D. Ill.) opened a criminal investigation that subsequently became known as the “Broadview Six” case. Boutros’s office indicted a half-dozen anti-ICE protesters, alleging that they conspired to forcibly impede an immigration agent while he was driving into the ICE facility in Broadview, a western suburb of Chicago. The case was immediately controversial because most of the defendants had ties to Democratic politics, which gave rise to accusations that the Trump administration was mounting a politically motivated prosecution.

The Broadview Six case spawned quite the saga, and many of you might be familiar with it based on coverage by others (such as Ken White and Josh Barro of Serious Trouble). I don’t have the space to retell the whole tale now; for a clear and concise primer, see this Tribune article (gift link). But as a certain federal judge recently wrote, “the SparkNotes is this”: The Broadview Six case imploded in spectacular fashion, all the charges were dismissed, Judge April Perry (N.D. Ill.) issued a bevy of benchslaps, and allegations of prosecutorial misconduct started flying. (This is, by the way, not the only case in which Judge Perry has had harsh words for Boutros and his office; I wrote about a different matter back in July.)

The case was initially handled by assistant U.S. attorney Sheri Mecklenburg, a veteran federal prosecutor with almost two decades of experience, who oversaw the first two (unsuccessful) attempts to get a grand jury to indict the Broadview Six. But in February 2026, she withdrew from the case, after leaving Chicago for a detail in Washington, D.C.

When the prosecution started going south in April and May, Boutros’s office laid much of the blame at Mecklenburg’s feet—even though she had left the case in February. This didn’t sit well with Mecklenburg, unsurprisingly—and last Thursday, she “retire[d] under protest” from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, issuing a scathing resignation letter explaining her departure. She also filed a motion for leave to intervene in sanctions proceedings initiated by lawyers for the Broadview Six, arguing that she’s entitled to defend herself against allegations of prosecutorial misconduct—especially if her former office isn’t willing to do so.

Here’s an excerpt from Mecklenburg’s missive to Boutros:

Since I was not present [at the May 21 hearing where you threw me under the bus], I was a convenient target to be scapegoated and publicly vilified. You recklessly agreed in court that I had committed misconduct without even asking for my account, fully reviewing the record or briefing the law.

That evening, you sent an office-wide email laying responsibility at my feet for a felony prosecution that you personally directed over my objection that the case was better suited to misdemeanor charges. You then publicly announced an investigation of my conduct spanning twenty years. These inexplicable actions severely damaged a reputation I worked hard to build over decades and have damaged my prospects for future employment and income.

For more on Mecklenburg’s messy departure, see the Tribune, The New York Times, and Above the Law—where columnist Liz Dye wrote that Mecklenburg’s “epic resignation letter” is “almost certainly a precursor to litigation against her former boss, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros.”

For critics of the Trump administration, the episode has an obvious irony: an aggressive prosecution of anti-ICE protesters has ended with the charges dismissed, the prosecutors under scrutiny, and the original lead prosecutor accusing the U.S. attorney of scapegoating her.

Judge of the Week: Judge Timothy Kelly.

On September 18, Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, attributing the banishment to “their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” The three outlets, represented by a Gibson Dunn & Crutcher team led by Theodore “Ted” Boutrous, quickly filed a lawsuit, claiming that Trump’s action violated the First and Fifth Amendments. From the complaint (citations omitted):

This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles. Presidents from the earliest days of the Republic have disagreed with and complained about the tenor and content of press coverage of their administrations. But as the Supreme Court has recognized, the First Amendment, including its guarantee of a free press, reflects “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open….”

[T]he Constitution protects the liberty and property interests that news organizations and White House reporters have in their press credentials and the access those credentials afford them to cover the White House for the benefit of the public. No official can deprive Plaintiffs of those interests on a whim—with no notice, no process, and no warning—as the President did here.

Cable News Network, Inc. v. Trump wound up before Judge Timothy J. Kelly (D.D.C.)—much to the chagrin of Trump. Taking to Truth Social, the president complained that the media organizations “have drawn a great Judge…. The Judge’s name is Tim Kelly, and he was, sadly, appointed by ‘TRUMP.’”

Consistent with Trump’s prediction, last Thursday Judge Kelly granted the plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order. More specifically, he directed the defendants to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore the White House ‘hard pass’ press credentials held by employees of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO that were revoked on or about September 18, 2026, until further Order of the Court or the expiration of this [TRO]” (currently scheduled for 14 days from issuance of the order, at which point Judge Kelly could issue a more long-term order or lift the TRO).

By Thursday afternoon, the banned outlets were allowed to return to covering the White House. But over the weekend, the Trump administration excluded CNN from the White House television pool, the rotating group of five networks that coordinate to provide TV coverage of Trump’s events—an issue not explicitly addressed in Judge Kelly’s order, but one I’m guessing CNN will raise with Judge Kelly very soon.

This high-profile litigation shone the spotlight on Judge Kelly, who was profiled by Mattathias Schwartz for The Times (gift link via Howard Bashman’s How Appealing). A graduate of Duke and Georgetown Law, Kelly practiced at Arnold & Porter, served as a federal prosecutor, and worked on Capitol Hill for Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

Although Kelly was appointed to the bench in 2017 by Trump, he hasn’t hesitated to rule against the president, as noted by Schwartz. Most notably, back in 2018, Judge Kelly ordered the administration to restore the press credentials of Jim Acosta, who at the time was CNN’s chief White House correspondent.

Judge Kelly has also sided with the administration at various points over the years. In 2017, for example, he ruled that Mick Mulvaney, selected by Trump to serve as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, could remain in place. Then earlier this year, Judge Kelly reluctantly dismissed a January 6-related criminal case against four Proud Boys, in response to a Justice Department motion. But before doing so, he wrote that “no one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement” with the decision to dismiss. He also called the attack on the Capitol “a perilous event”—and questioned whether Trump’s take on January 6 was “based on fact or fiction.”

Job of the Week: an opportunity for a midlevel to senior labor and employment associate in Atlanta.

Lateral Link is partnering with an Am Law 100 firm seeking a fourth- to eighth-year associate to join its Chambers-ranked labor and employment group in Atlanta. This sophisticated practice combines employment litigation with counseling and transactional work, including restrictive covenant disputes, employment litigation, executive employment agreements and negotiations, and employment issues arising in corporate transactions. The ideal candidate will have a mix of L&E litigation, counseling, and transactional experience, excellent academic credentials, and experience at a leading law firm. The partners are also open to hiring employment litigators interested in expanding their practice, as the counseling and transactional aspects can be learned on the job. To be considered, please send your résumé and law school transcript to Marion Wilson at mwilson@laterallink.com.

Read more

Remember the Disinformation Governance Board? As we were quick to point out, this organization was named in the dumbest possible way by some incompetent people within the Biden administration, which only fed into the [ahem] disinformation around it. The program, a part of DHS, was an advisory group with no enforcement capabilities, and was tasked with coordinating standard best practices for government agencies to respond to and counter foreign disinformation campaigns. But it was launched with a blatantly over-the-top Orwellian name and with only vague details of its actual role, leaving the field open to everyone to speculate… or to pollute.

And speculate they did. Almost immediately the media was awash in people screaming about how Biden was creating a “Ministry of Truth” who would “police your speech.”

Fox News absolutely lost their minds, apparently mentioning the Board and its named director, Nina Jankowicz approximately 300 times in the course of just eight months. According to a (somewhat misguided and unsuccessful) lawsuit that Jankowicz later filed, Fox News became obsessed about claiming she was the new censorship czar of America:

The next day, on April 29, 2022, 11 different speakers referenced Jankowicz and the Board on 11 separate segments. Hannity repeated the falsehood that the Board was “in charge of policing disinformation,” and that Jankowicz is now “the person that polices our thoughts.” Fox News tweeted: “What you’re seeing is a full-scale attack on free speech in a country that has been free for nearly 250 years.”

On Fox & Friends, Carly Shimkus said Jankowicz is “lead[ing] a government board in charge of deciding what we can and cannot say.” On Outnumbered, Emily Compagno said Jankowicz is “now the official referee of disinformation” and also a “self-obsessed social media neophyte [who the country has now set as] as the champion, as the arbiter of truth.” Greg Gutfeld followed suit on Gutfeld!, warning that the Board “will likely target you,” and stating unequivocally that the goal of the Board is “to police your opinions, to hide their bad news or magically turn it into good news.”

This went on and on and on and on, despite all of it being nonsense. The board had no enforcement authority at all. It wasn’t about policing anything, let alone free speech or “truth.”

Even today you’ll hear MAGA folks claim that Biden had planned to launch a “Ministry of Truth” to try to censor Americans for their political wrong think.

Now contrast that with the coverage of Trump from a month ago openly telling his FCC to get more aggressive about policing speech. We mentioned it briefly, and there were a few news reports talking about how Donald Trump was demanding his FCC punish speech about his negative polls.

And then he demanded that the FCC punish news anchor Kristen Welker for the thoughtcrime of noting that in recent elections Trump had a bit of a “mixed record” on the success of his endorsements.

He literally says: “she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.”

That was a month ago. What have you heard about Trump “Ministry of Truth” since? There’s obviously been coverage of his banning of some White House reporters, but the story of him literally demanding the FCC start punishing reporters for not reporting things the way Trump wants them to report was literally him demanding the FCC act as a Ministry of Truth, with Brendan Carr gleefully at the helm.

And, unlike Jankowicz, who went out of her way to explain that she wasn’t policing anyone’s speech, and who resigned within weeks after the death threats and harassment made the job untenable, Carr has embraced the role of actual speech cop. Hell, a year and a half ago when The Hollywood Reporter called out Carr’s role as Trump’s speech police attack dog, Carr responded with a screenshot of the caricature of him as an attack dog and tweeted “woof woof.”

And, of course, when questioned about Trump’s latest ridiculous speech police demands, Carr immediately promised to dutifully get his Ministry of Truth working on it.

In an appearance on “The Sunday Briefing” on Fox News, the Trump-appointed Carr was asked about the president’s threat against Welker. Carr responded by suggesting that broadcast news channels could face consequences if the agency interprets their reporting to not serve the public, citing “fake polls” designed to “suppress” voters as a potential risk.

“President Trump is over the target. We’re looking at a lot of actions,” Carr said, responding to host Peter Doocy. “There’s a lot of interest right now in fake polls that are out there. The FCC may put guidance out soon to remind broadcasters about their obligations with effect to not airing fake polls, particularly if they’re done to suppress people heading into the fall.”

And yet, that story lasted all of what, two days? Does anyone even remember that it happened?

It’s incredible the double standard at work. Biden launches something that is very far from being “the Ministry of Truth,” and the MAGA media machine spends the next eight months — and, really, the next four years — blasting out the fake news every damn day that Biden had hired someone to police everyone’s speech.

Four years later, Donald Trump publicly demands that the FCC — a supposedly independent agency that, unlike the DGB, actually does have enforcement powers, in theory limited by the First Amendment — punish a network anchor. And the guy running it hops right to it, promising to go after polls showing Trump’s popularity is in the dumps.

And the story disappears.

In 2022, we got nothing but hand-wringing from the loudest “but muh free speech” voices. Bari Weiss’s “The Free Press” had an article “All Hail America’s New Truth Czar!” about the controversy:

And Weiss herself went on Fox News (naturally) to mock it as the Ministry of Truth.

Now that the FCC is actually acting as the Ministry of Truth with Weiss running CBS News (complete with Brendan Carr’s designated “bias monitor” to police its speech)… I can find zero coverage from CBS News — a newsroom with vastly more resources than The Free Press — of Trump demanding that his FCC police the speech of one of CBS’s main competitors.

Gosh. I wonder why.

The Disinformation Governance Board (still a terrible name and roll out plan) had no enforcement power and no authority over American speech. It never actually launched and was completely abandoned within weeks. Yet it received 300 Fox News segments over the rest of 2022, and to this day people will insist that Biden launched a “Ministry of Truth” to police domestic speech.

Meanwhile, the FCC actually licenses broadcasters, and its chair just took orders directly from the president to “punish” reporters for truthful speech, and said he’s “looking at a lot of actions.”

That news cycle lasted about two days and is barely remembered.

Woof woof!

Police in the United Kingdom have arrested five ⁠men near an airbase used by the United States to strike Iran on suspicion of explosive and "terrorism" offences. US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that the ⁠suspects were looking to do "big damage" and were under investigation by UK and US authorities.

Five men arrested near a key U.S. bomber base in the U.K. on Sunday may have planned a "complex," coordinated attack with potentially far-reaching security implications for American military installations globally, a former U.S. intelligence official warned. As counterterrorism police investigated after officers detained the suspects near RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, a former Pentagon official also said President Donald Trump would ultimately be the one to decide the consequences if indeed the "trail leads to Tehran."

Trump’s tariffs and his war against Iran caused prices to rise, but the US president continues to claim it’s ‘the greatest economy in history’

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Donald Trump has taken to repeating a familiar boast: “We have the greatest economy in history,” Trump said recently at a White House press gaggle. The boast comes even though inflation is higher and economic growth lower than when Joe Biden left office, even though gas prices have jumped about 50% since the war against Iran started, and even though 73% of Americans think the economy is in fair or poor shape (48% say it’s in poor shape). What’s more, the Federal Reserve is so worried about inflation that it just raised interest rates.

“It’s bluster, it’s gaslighting for him to say the economy is the greatest ever,” said Darrick Hamilton, chief economist for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main union federation. “The economy is trending down by many measures. A lot of that has been caused by Trump’s unforced errors.”

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Hoping to win back male voters, the Trump White House is pushing the regressive idea that one hormone could be a magic elixir of masculinity

Two years after Donald Trump decisively won the vote of the American man, polls say male voters are increasingly disillusioned with an administration that has waged wars and enriched itself.

Ahead of the midterms, Trump’s strategy seems to be to find a way to get that masculine animus back, so the male populace will vote not with their heads or their hearts, but with their hogs. At least, that’s one way of understanding why, this summer, Trump’s secretaries of health and defense announced plans that could increase levels of testosterone, or simply “T”, in the civilian and military population.

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Trump told Axios he expected talks to resume a day after he rejected Iran’s proposal to reopen the strait of Hormuz within seven days

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While the lawmakers in the US House have already left Washington to get a head start on midterm campaigning, the Senate is hoping to wrap up its legislative agenda this week. Today, we can expect a vote at 5.30pm ET on the Protect College Sports act, which attempts to provide greater protections for university athletes in the US.

The bill includes provisions for players to earn compensation from their name, image and likeness – known as NIL payments, and allow them to transfer schools (and teams) without being penalized or forced to sit out for a defined period of time. If the legislation clears the Senate it will still need to head back to the lower chamber before it can head to Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.

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Major League Baseball has approached the Trump administration about the possibility of staging a game at a national park, according to reports. Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming has emerged as a potential location, with officials reportedly exploring possible sites for a temporary baseball facility. The idea would be similar to MLB's Field of Dreams games, which have been held at unique locations outside traditional ballparks.

Donald Trump asked Xi Jinping "at one point" whether China was interested in buying American weapons, the US envoy to Beijing said on Sunday. In an interview with Fox News, ambassador David Perdue said: "President Trump continues to say: hey, we sell arms to other people around the world. He actually asked President Xi would he like to buy some at one point?"

The White House has expanded a series of taxpayer-funded advertisements boosting President Donald Trump, including a new spot that repurposes imagery and political rhetoric Trump used while campaigning for president.

It’s so bad some Republicans are even turning against him – bit late guys but whatever

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David Perdue’s remarks come after a Taiwanese minister spoke of the ‘severe’ military threat posed by Beijing to the self-ruled island

Donald Trump offered to sell weapons to China while hosting its leader, Xi Jinping, last week, the US ambassador to China said on Sunday.

David Perdue told Fox News on Sunday: “President Trump continues to say, hey, we sell arms to other people around the world. He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point.”

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