A lot has happened. Here are some of the things. This is the TPM Morning Memo.
$500,000 for electoral subversion
In a spending bill that is part of the deal to end the government shutdown is a provision that would allow Republican senators to personally sue the federal government for up to $500,000 for special counsel Jack Smith’s legal search of their phone records, according to the New York Times.
As part of his January 6 investigation, Smith duly subpoenaed the tolling records of certain Republican Party members of Congress. In recent weeks, Republicans on the Hill have resurfaced this fact and turned it into a Deep State conspiracy theory, exaggerating what Smith got and trying to turn it into a constitutional dispute.
D.C. District Judge James Boasberg approved measures barring phone providers from informing lawmakers that their data dating back to around Jan. 6 was requested as part of the investigation, Politico notes. The bill’s provision imposes new restrictions that would require senators to be notified of the search of their records and prohibit judges from preventing that notice unless the senator is the subject of a criminal investigation.
Most controversial is that the bill’s provision retroactively allows senators targeted by Smith to sue the federal government, the New York Times reports: “Because the provision is retroactive to 2022, it would appear to make eligible the eight lawmakers whose phone records were subpoenaed by Mr. Smith’s investigators as he examined Donald J. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the results of the 2020 presidential election.”
The Republican senators in question are Lindsey Graham (SC), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Bill Hagerty (TN), Josh Hawley (MO), Dan Sullivan (AK), Tommy Tuberville (AL), Ron Johnson (WI), and Cynthia Lummis (WI).
The bill’s language comes directly from Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Politico reports.
January 6. Pardons are Trump’s signal
A good article from Politico’s legal journalist duo on the implications of President Trump’s latest pardons in the 2020 Big Lie project:
(1) This is a precursor to election denial in the future:
The mass pardon — the first in history to cover people accused of criminal conspiracy with the president who granted it — comes as Trump continues to fuel false claims about widespread cheating by Democrats and sow doubt about the integrity of future elections. And its opponents see the pardon as authorization for similar efforts in 2026 and 2028.
(2) It is extremely broad:
But the language used in the pardon also emphasizes that Trump’s clemency is not limited to those named in the document. Rather, it applies to all those who helped design or defend Trump’s strategy of using fraudulent presidential elector lists as part of his strategy to stay in power, as well as all those who worked to “expose voter fraud and vulnerabilities” in the 2020 election.
Corruption: Pardonpalooza edition
In addition to the latest round of pardons on January 6, President Trump continues to give special treatment to a combination of politically connected and publicly corrupt people:
- Former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada and his former chief of staff, Cade Cothren, were pardoned even though they were only convicted in May of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy related to a scheme involving Constituent Mail Services, Politico reports. Casada was sentenced in September to 36 months in prison.
- Without making a public announcement, President Trump pardoned Robert Harshbarger Jr., the husband of Rep. Diana Harshbarger (TN), who pleaded guilty to health care fraud in 2013, the New York Times reports.
White: Trump’s DOJ “at war” with judges
As Trump’s DOJ struggled to retain lawyers and staff, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Friday pitched young conservative lawyers at a Federalist Society event in Washington to join the war against “activist judges.”
“We need you, because this is a war, and it’s something we won’t win if we don’t keep fighting,” said the DOJ’s No. 2.
Blanche was specifically referring to the legal setbacks the Trump administration has suffered in district courts.
It’s hard to get media attention, it’s hard to get the American people to realize what a travesty it is when an individual judge can stop an entire operation or an entire administrative policy that is constitutional and permissible simply because he or she chooses to do so. So it’s a war.
Blanche’s remarks come a day after a former Trump DOJ official said at the same conference that Congress should begin impeaching judges who have blocked Trump’s policies.
“What will force the Supreme Court doing something is basically political pressure. This will be the time when Congress starts impeaching judges and saying… ‘You’re now encroaching on our territory,'” said Mizelle, whose wife is a federal district judge.
SCOTUS takes charge of mail-in voting
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case challenging a Mississippi law allowing the counting of mail-in ballots arriving after Election Day. The case had nationwide implications, with around 30 states allowing mail-in ballots to be counted after Election Day.
Monitoring mass deportations
- The Trump administration filed a lawsuit late last week to deport the repeatedly brutalized Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia, a country to which he has no ties.
- The New York Times interviewed 40 of the Venezuelan men who were illegally imprisoned at CECOT earlier this year after being deported by the Trump administration under the Foreign Enemies Act.
- The Trump administration has paid $7.5 million to the government of Equatorial Guinea as it seeks to deport people to the West African country, according to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
- Since April, DHS has stopped automatically capturing communications between officials and instead requires them to take screenshots of their messages in a bizarre workflow, the New York Times reports: “The policy expects officials to first take screenshots of text messages on their work phones, send them to their work email, download them to their work computers, then run a program that would recognize the text to store it in searchable formats, according to department guidelines submitted to the court.
Trump’s deadly misadventure
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has worked to purge at least two dozen general officers and sideline military lawyers precisely to enable the kind of unauthorized war the Trump administration is engaged in against drug cartels and the Maduro regime in Venezuela:
- The number of illegal US strikes against ships in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific has risen to 19, with a death toll of 76… as far as we know.
- The Trump administration has created a secret list of 24 Latin American cartels and criminal organizations that are now “designated terrorist organizations,” The Intercept reports.
- Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham, a retired Air Force judge advocate, calls U.S. strikes on suspected drug trafficking boats “murder.”
Kash Patel leaves MI5 suspended
FBI Director Kash Patel reassured the MI5 chief that he would keep the job as an FBI agent in London who assists in counter-espionage – then went back on his promise, the New York Times reports.
Trump attacks BBC
President Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $1 billion over how it edited a clip of his January 6, 2021 speech on The Ellipse for a documentary last year. The disputed edit has already led to the resignations of BBC director-general Tim Davie and BBC News director-general Deborah Turness. BBC chairman Samir Shah yesterday apologized for the controversy.
Quote of the day
“The deference and servility toward Ms. Maxwell reached such absurd levels that one of the establishment’s senior officials complained that he was ‘fed up with having to be Maxwell’s bitch.’Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), describing the preferential treatment allegedly given to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell since her arrival at a minimum-security prison camp
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