Attention to the Unseen

Vox reports: President Donald Trump is going after a pair of major law firms — and attacking the First Amendment in the process. Trump issued an executive order on Thursday that took aim at Perkins Coie, a law firm that represented Hillary Clinton when she ran against Trump in 2016. Notably, Perkins Coie hired a research firm that produced the infamous “Steele dossier,” which alleged the president colluded with Russia to steal the election. Trump’s order aims to strip the…

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The Guardian reports: A prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s student encampment movement was arrested on Saturday night by federal immigration authorities who claimed they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card, according to his attorney. Mahmoud Khalil was at his university-owned apartment, blocks from the private Ivy League university’s main campus in New York when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents entered the building and took him into custody, his attorney,…

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Joyce Vance writes: Who is Humphrey’s Executor and why should you care? Humphrey’s Executor was the plaintiff in a 1930s court case. Mr. Humphrey, a Federal Trade Commissioner, had passed away, and the executor of his will wanted to recover the salary he was due for his work as a commissioner from October 8, 1933, to the time of his death on February 14, 1934. The problem was that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had fired Humphrey, who refused to resign,…

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  President Trump has sworn to root out corruption within the government, yet one of his first acts as president was to fire over a dozen independent watchdogs who did exactly that. We spoke to seven of them about the abuses they uncovered, what they really think about DOGE and what all this means for the future of American democracy.

TPM reports: The Trump White House has taken its attempt to seize direct control over the entire executive branch to a new level and laid out a startling legal rationale for the move in a previously unreported email obtained by TPM. If successful, Trump would be making a dramatic end run around the Senate’s advice and consent power for certain appointed positions. Trump’s wide-ranging effort to bring independent agencies firmly under his control provoked a dramatic confrontation this week at…

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The Guardian reports: Amy Coney Barrett, the Donald Trump-appointed conservative supreme court justice, has been branded a “DEI judge” by furious rightwing figures, after she voted to reject Trump’s attempt to freeze nearly $2bn in foreign aid. Coney Barrett, part of the court’s rightwing majority, split with her fellow conservative justices this week. She and John Roberts, the chief justice, voted to leave in place a ruling from a US district judge which ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze the…

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Erwin Chemerinsky writes: It is not hyperbole to say that the future of American constitutional democracy now rests on a single question: Will President Trump and his administration defy court orders? Federal judges have issued more than a dozen temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions against Trump administration actions. But it is unclear whether the government will comply, and in at least two cases, judges have said their orders were ignored. The Trump administration is already facing at least 100…

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NBC News reports: Two of President Donald Trump’s allies have launched bids for leadership roles with the D.C. Bar Association, an under-the-radar effort that would give them more control over the influential legal group. The push comes amid bar associations’ confrontations with the Trump administration, and some federal attorneys have looked to their state groups for ethical guidance amid Trump’s rapid reshaping of government. Bradley Bondi — a lawyer who is Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother — and Alicia Long…

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Politico reports: Senate Republicans urged Elon Musk on Wednesday to better coordinate with them, with many suggesting the tech billionaire send Congress a package of proposed spending cuts to enshrine the work of his Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The message was delivered during a closed-door lunch organized by Florida Sen. Rick Scott in the latest instance of congressional Republicans, who have generally praised his efforts, counseling Musk to more closely loop in lawmakers. The meeting came just hours after…

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NBC News reports: The head of the FBI’s New York Field Office was forced out of the bureau on Monday, a month after he urged his employees to “dig in” after the Trump administration removed senior FBI leaders and requested the names of all agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases, five sources familiar with the matter told NBC News. In an email to FBI staff in New York on Monday, Dennehy said that he had been forced to retire….

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The New York Times reports: Congressional Republicans, egged on by Elon Musk and other top allies of President Trump, are escalating calls to remove federal judges who stand in the way of administration efforts to overhaul the government. The outcry is threatening yet another assault on the constitutional guardrails that constrain the executive branch. Judicial impeachments are rare and notoriously time-consuming. The mounting calls for removing federal judges, who already face increasing security threats, have so far not gained much…

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The Washington Post reports: A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind directives that initiated the mass firing of probationary workers across the government, ruling that the terminations were probably illegal, as a group of labor unions argued in court. U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered OPM to rescind its previous directives to more than two dozen agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Science Foundation…

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The Bulwark‘s Tim Miller discusses with Ben Wittes the ramifications of the FBI declining to take action when there is clear evidence of criminal actions: