Video of the arrest of Amanda Trebach, a member of the immigrant rights’ group Unión del Barrio and an ICU nurse, who was monitoring ICE operations in the Los Angeles, begs many questions not the least of which is this: who is ICE recruiting? “Yanis Varoufuckice” recently attended a Department of Homeland Security job fair at the Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Virginia where they spent two days talking to people looking for jobs with ICE: One of the…
Ron Dudai writes: A decade ago, in the final days of the weekly joint Palestinian–Jewish protests against Israel’s construction of the separation wall in the West Bank village of Al-Ma’asara, one of our pre-demonstration rituals was a speech by Mahmoud, a local community leader. Phone in hand, he would declare: “We will not have another Nakba, because now we have this. We have a smartphone. We have Facebook. They will try to drive us away again, but everyone will see…
Barton Gellman writes: At first glance, President Trump’s Truth Social post alleging voting fraud did not look especially alarming — not, anyway, by this president’s singular standards. Mr. Trump’s long-debunked lies about stolen elections are no less malignant in 2025 than they were in 2020 and 2021, during his concerted effort to overturn his loss at the polls. Still, by now, persistent repetition has diminished the power of those lies to shock. And yet something quite shocking did emerge from…
The Los Angeles Times reports: This year’s most far-reaching immigration case is likely to decide if immigration agents in Los Angeles are free to stop, question and arrest Latinos they suspect are here illegally. President Trump promised the “largest mass deportation operation” in American history, and he chose to begin aggressive street sweeps in Los Angeles in early June. The Greater Los Angeles area is “ground zero for the effects of the border crisis,” his lawyers told the Supreme Court…
The Guardian reports: The Dutch foreign minister, Caspar Veldkamp, has resigned after a cabinet meeting failed to secure sanctions against Israel, weakening the Netherlands’ already fragile caretaker government. Veldkamp’s colleagues from the centrist New Social Contract (NSC) party also walked out after the cabinet debate late on Friday reached an impasse over adopting harsher measures against Israel. The discussions about taking further steps against Israel came after the Netherlands joined 20 other countries in signing a joint declaration on Thursday…
Adam Klasfeld writes: For two days of meandering questioning in Tallahassee, Fla., Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorney turned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche gave convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell ample opportunity to rehabilitate herself at the expense of victims like Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre’s lawyer Sigrid McCawley, who represents hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein survivors, said that Maxwell “repeatedly and brazenly lied on the record to the government” in these transcripts. “Maxwell ruined countless young lives with impunity for too long,”…
Ghislaine Maxwell’s interview transcripts reveal a cover-up in real time, attempting to help Donald Trump distract America from his shady relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. I joined Zev Shalev to discuss what we learned from today’s transcripts, Maxwell’s endgame, and the financial trail and characters that corporate media are still missing when it comes to the Epstein story.
Politico reports: President Trump’s close allies are welcoming convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell telling top Justice Department officials she never witnessed him “in any inappropriate setting” with young girls in his history of dealings with Jeffrey Epstein. MAGA loyalists quickly began circulating passages of Maxwell’s interview transcript released by DOJ on Friday in which Epstein’s former girlfriend says she never witnessed the president committing any wrongdoing. The DOJ’s announcement earlier this year that it would not release files connected to…
Axios reports: MAGA is pushing the Trump administration to explain why an Israeli official who was arrested in an undercover child sex sting in Nevada was allowed to leave the U.S. after posting bail. Why it matters: The outrage marks the latest fissure between Israel and MAGA, which already faces a generational divide over how much the U.S. should support Israel amid the war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Driving the news: Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, a senior Israeli cybersecurity official, was arrested during an undercover operation in…
Mother Jones reports: A federal judge in Miami has ruled that operations at the controversial detention facility Alligator Alcatraz must begin to wind down, ordering state and federal officials to stop transferring detainees there and relocate current detainees within 60 days. Two weeks after US District Judge Kathleen Williams, an Obama appointee, ordered a temporary pause on any new construction at Alligator Alcatraz, in response to a suit by environmental groups, she has now ordered the dismantling of equipment at…
CNN reports: The FBI Agents Association is warning lawmakers that recent firings at the agency have “purposely violated” the due process rights of agents, expressly calling out FBI Director Kash Patel for what the association sees as flagrant policy violations and potential political retribution. “We want you to be aware that Director Patel is making personnel decisions without providing the due process protections promised to the recently terminated law enforcement officers under federal law,” the association’s president, Natalie Bara, wrote…
Professor Omer Bartov concludes that the word genocide describes Israel’s conduct in Gaza and as such requires the U.S. and Europe to intervene and stop Israel’s destructive path. In his forthcoming book, Israel: What Went Wrong, Bartov unpacks how a country founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust by a marginalized people could now become a pariah state that is occupying and displacing the Palestinians with active support, or indifference, of so many of its Jewish citizens. We discuss…
Melissa Gira Grant writes: The beatdown in broad daylight in Washington, D.C., on Saturday was caught on video. Two masked men in tactical vests grappled with a delivery worker. One tased him, and he fell to the ground. A third man piled on, and then a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth, all in similar vests with faces covered. Pinning the worker face down on the pavement, agents tased him again and punched him repeatedly in the head. “Get the…
Don Moynihan writes: One trademark of an authoritarian regime is the use of the legal system to target political opponents and forgive friends. This has the effect of undermining our basic conception of the law as a set of rules that is fairly and consistently applied. It also centralizes authority and undermines government capacity. Trump’s call for Federal Reserve member Lisa Cook to resign, under the threat of a DOJ investigation, is a clear example of this type of authoritarianism….
Wired reports: United States Custom and Border Protection officials have sweeping powers to search anyone’s phone when they are entering the country—including US citizens. Newly released figures show that over the past three months, CBP officials have been searching more phones and other devices than ever before. From April through June this year, CBP searched 14,899 devices carried by international travelers, according to stats published on the agency’s website. While the figures aren’t broken down by device type, the CBP…
Cristian Farias writes: The Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is so short and self-evident that you don’t need a law degree to understand it, or a judge to explain it to you: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” That language had real teeth during Donald Trump’s first Presidency, as states, cities, and localities invoked it to stop…