Attention to the Unseen

The Associated Press reports: Mismanagement at a massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas created unsafe conditions that contributed to detainee deaths and suffering even as millions of wasted tax dollars enriched contractors, according to a federal report released Tuesday. The Government Accountability Office report documents serious problems at Camp East Montana, a sprawling tent facility at Fort Bliss in El Paso where three detainees have died in little more than six months. Evidence in one of those deaths,…

Read More Read More

By Molly Redden and Avi Asher-Schapiro This story was originally published by ProPublica Trump administration officials earlier this year killed a federal criminal investigation into the coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia and a close ally of the president’s. The investigation examined potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by the multistate mining operations largely run by Justice’s son, Jay, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter. The criminal probe…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: Federal officials have quietly begun fast-tracking cases through immigration courts, pushing dozens of additional cases onto the dockets on certain days in an effort to more quickly process asylum and other claims. The fast-tracking, which is also intended to increase the pace of deportations, started without any formal notification or announcement from the Trump administration, according to immigration lawyers and court officials interviewed by The New York Times. But a surge of cases has been…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive. The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: A federal appeals court panel expressed skepticism Friday about the Trump administration’s view that courts are powerless to stop the construction of the White House ballroom now that the East Wing had been demolished. Two members of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit repeatedly pressed administration lawyers about its argument that President Donald Trump’s pet project — now well underway — could not be stopped by the courts even…

Read More Read More

The Guardian reports: Keir Starmer has suggested the US is trying to interfere in British democracy after JD Vance, the US vice-president, blamed the murder of the British teenager Henry Nowak on mass migration. The prime minister’s office responded after the senior Republican politician claimed in a post on X that Nowak would be alive “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: More than half of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months, according to a report released Thursday by a government watchdog group. Fourteen of the 27 known corporate donors to the $400 million project, which would replace the East Wing that Trump demolished in October, have seen their government business grow in that window,…

Read More Read More

  Will Judge Williams find that Trump “Defrauded” the Court in his IRS suit and “weaponization fund” case? On a special Legal AF, J. Michael Luttig, retired federal appellate judge and one of the leaders of the 35 judges that got Judge Williams to reopen the case and determine if there has been fraud on the court, and Andres Rivero, local counsel for the judges, joins Michael Popok to brief the audience on what Judge Luttig says is the END…

Read More Read More

The Wall Street Journal reports: The debate over how to respond to Omnicom Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group to create the world’s largest advertising business came down to two people: Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson—and President Trump. Sitting in the Oval Office with Ferguson last August to discuss the deal, once considered a run-of-the-mill review left to FTC staff, Trump invited an interested party to weigh in. He dialed his friend Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, who had…

Read More Read More

By Robert Faturechi This story was originally published by ProPublica A group of lawmakers demanded answers from the White House this week following a ProPublica investigation revealing that a top aide to the president intervened to secure a $620 million Pentagon loan to a startup linked to the president’s eldest son. ProPublica’s reporting “reveals a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling that superseded this process, enriching the President’s son at the expense of U.S. national security and taxpayer dollars,”…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: The Trump administration will drop its $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that was widely criticized as a payout for the president’s allies, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a congressional hearing Tuesday. “We’re not moving forward with the fund, period,” said Blanche in remarks before the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the Department of Justice. Republican blowback from the announcement of the fund has stalled movement on an immigration enforcement bill in the Senate, where GOP…

Read More Read More