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      Puerto Rico drops climate lawsuit after DoJ sues states to block threats to big oil

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      Puerto Rico has voluntarily dismissed its 2024 climate lawsuit against big oil, a Friday legal filing shows, just two days after the US justice department sued two states over planned litigation against oil companies for their role in the climate crisis.Puerto Rico’s lawsuit, filed in July, alleged that the oil and gas giants had misled the public about the climate dangers associated with their products. It came as part of a wave of litigation filed by dozens of US states, cities and municipalities in recent years.Donald Trump’s administration has pledged to put an end to these cases, which he has called “frivolous” and claimed are unconstitutional. In court filings on Wednesday, his justice department claimed the Clean Air Act “displaces” states’ ability to regulate greenhouse gas outside their borders.The agency specifically targeted Michigan, whose Democratic attorney general last year tapped private law firms to work on such a case, and Hawaii, whose Democratic governor filed its suit on Thursday. Officials from both states condemned the justice department’s filings.Friday’s filing from Puerto Rico did not list a reason for the lawsuit’s dismissal. The Guardian has contacted the territory’s attorney general’s office for comment and asked whether it was related to the Trump administration’s moves on Wednesday.Reached for comment, John Lamson, a spokesperson for the San Francisco-based law firm Sher Edling, which filed the 2024 suit on behalf of Puerto Rico said: “We serve under the direction and control, and at the pleasure, of our clients in all of our representations.”Puerto Rico in November elected as governor the Republican Jenniffer González-Colón, a Trump ally. In February, González-Colón tapped Janet Parra-Mercado as the territory’s new attorney general.Climate-accountability litigation has also faced recent attacks in the media. Last month, an oilfield services executive published an op-ed in Forbes saying the Puerto Rico lawsuit “may derail” efforts to improve grid reliability.Groups tied to the far-right legal architect Leonard Leo have also campaigned against the lawsuits. And just days before the voluntary dismissal, the rightwing, pro-fossil fuel advocacy group American Energy Institute (AEI) sent a letter to González-Colón, Fox News reported, calling for an end to climate-focused “coordinated lawfare”.“Their goal is to bankrupt energy companies or to leverage the threat of tort damages to force outcomes that would be disastrous for Puerto Rico and the rest of the nation,” AEI’s CEO, Jason Isaac, wrote of the plaintiffs.AEI has attacked climate-focused legal efforts and has been linked to Leo, the Guardian has reported.In December, a California-based trade association of commercial fishers voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit accusing big oil of climate deception.In two earlier lawsuits, 37 Puerto Rico municipalities and the capital city of San Juan accused fossil fuel companies of conspiring to deceive the public about the climate crisis, seeking to hold them accountable for the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria. More

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      Pam Bondi turning DoJ into Trump’s ‘personal law firm’, top experts warn

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      Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has taken radical steps to target his political foes, back a harsh agenda against undocumented immigrants and help business allies – steps which underscore its politicization under the attorney general Pam Bondi and undermine the rule of law, say ex-prosecutors and legal experts.Some even say that the department has in effect become Trump’s “personal law firm”.Since taking office a second time, Trump has relied on staunch loyalist Bondi and an elite group of justice department lawyers to investigate critics from his first administration plus political opponents and curb prosecutions of US business bribery overseas.Ex-prosecutors point to how Bondi and the department’s top lawyers have halted some major prosecutions, fired or forced out lawyers who didn’t meet Maga litmus tests, and were instructed by Trump to investigate a key Democratic fundraising vehicle as examples of how Trump and Bondi have politicized the justice department.Critics note that once Bondi became attorney general, she issued a memo establishing a “weaponization working group”, which pushed a false narrative that investigations by a special counsel into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election and his improperly retaining classified documents were politically motivated.The transformation of the Department of Justice under Bondi has put a premium for staff on “personal loyalty” to Trump, say ex-prosecutors, which has damaged the rule of law and provoked multiple rebukes from courts and the resignations or firings of veteran prosecutors.“The steps Trump and Bondi have taken using DoJ to punish enemies and reward allies while firing those who object radically transforms and politicizes DoJ in a way that not even the worst who have gone before them ever contemplated,” the former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig said.“Trump’s transmuting DoJ into his personal law firm is, in effect, a rejection of the founding principle of the rule of law.”Other ex-prosecutors see the department marching in dangerous legal lockstep with Trump’s agenda and damaging its mission to protect the rule of law.“Bondi and DoJ lawyers have certainly tried to make personal loyalty to Trump the justice department’s guiding principle,” said the Columbia law professor and ex-federal prosecutor Daniel Richman.Critics note Bondi has also echoed Trump’s dangerous rhetorical blasts against judges who have ruled against his administration’s sweeping and haphazard drive to deport undocumented immigrants by labeling them “low-level leftist judges who are trying to dictate President Trump’s executive powers”.After the FBI arrested a Milwaukee judge for allegedly obstructing the arrest of an undocumented immigrant, Bondi went on Fox News to threaten other judges who may defy their agenda. “They’re deranged. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law, and they are not. We will come after you and we will prosecute you,” she said.Hundreds of lawyers and staff in the justice department’s civil rights division are now leaving the storied unit as its focus has shifted to Trump priorities such as pursuing cases against elite universities and student protesters, while curbing some civil and voting rights cases it has traditionally pursued, say critics.Other actions by the department under Bondi, an ex-Florida attorney general who later worked on Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment trial in 2020, and some elite justice department lawyers reflect its strong allegiance to Trump and have sparked strong criticism.They include an investigation of two officials, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, who served in his first term and clashed with him for, respectively, not backing his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and for voicing strong concerns in a 2018 New York Times op ed about how Trump threatened democracy.In another radical move, Trump issued an executive order in April telling the justice department to investigate unverified allegations that ActBlue, a major Democratic online fundraising vehicle, had engaged in improper fundraising schemes.Trump also reportedly prodded the Department of Justice to drop a five-count criminal fraud prosecution of the New York mayor, Eric Adams, that the elite justice department southern district had worked on for months, as Trump was eager to secure public support from Adams for his immigration agenda in the city.Some actions also appear aimed at helping allied business interests. In April, the justice department abruptly closed a cryptocurrency unit that was launched in 2022 and had successfully prosecuted dangerous criminal schemes involving North Korean hackers and other fraudsters, but which had come under fire from cryptocurrency leaders who helped fund Trump’s campaign last year.Trump’s justice department also has paused for six months prosecuting businesses that have been charged with violating the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which bars paying bribes to win deals abroad.Other moves seem to reflect Trump’s enmity towards journalists who report critically about his administration. In a reversal of recent department policy, Bondi revoked journalists’ free-speech protections by greenlighting authorities to force journalists to reveal confidential sources in leak investigations. Meanwhile, Bondi also seems willing to protect political allies, such as when she declined to open an investigation into “Signalgate” despite extensive documentation that top national security officials had improperly shared classified information as an attack was imminent in Yemen against the Houthis.Ex-prosecutors say that Bondi and the justice department’s willingness to make personal loyalty to Trump paramount damages the rule of law.Critics note the justice department has been rebuked by federal courts for stonewalling court orders and questions about some of its deportation actions and for not bringing home a Maryland man originally from El Salvador who was sent to a notorious Salvadorian prison as a result of what Ice has called an “administrative error”.“Never in history has DoJ broken so defiantly from respecting, as it’s obligated to do, the decisions of federal courts,” said the former prosecutor Ty Cobb, who was a counsel in the White House during Trump’s first term. “This is a war that Trump and Bondi are waging against the rule of law.”Richman noted more broadly that “outside the immigration area, most of what Bondi has actually done so far, however, has been negative – like dropping the case against Mayor Adams and cases against FCPA defendants and firing prosecutors”.Richman added: “We will soon see how this administration fares when it actually seeks a result in court, even if it’s only defensive. As the proceedings in the recent Maryland deportation case highlighted, courts demand a candor and respect for law that the justice department’s leadership finds inconsistent with the loyalty it demands.”Some veteran prosecutors who quit the department after Trump and Bondi took office say that the pair’s first moves raised red flags that prompted their departures.“Bondi has made clear – before becoming attorney general, and since – that she wants the Department of Justice to support President Trump unconditionally,” said Mike Romano, who resigned from the department in late March.Before he quit, Romano spent almost four years working on the prosecutions of Trump allies who stormed Congress on 6 January 2021 in an effort to thwart Joe Biden’s certification by Congress.Romano said that the night Bondi was confirmed “she issued a memorandum to all justice department employees in which she threatened to fire employees who refuse to defend the Trump administration’s actions, advance its arguments or sign its briefs. She and her subordinates have made good on those threats by firing people and forcing them to resign.”Romano stressed that “some of my colleagues were fired, and others were demoted, because they prosecuted people who rioted at the Capitol. At the public integrity section, four of my managers resigned, in lieu of being fired, when they refused to sign a motion to dismiss the case against Mayor Adams. These actions send a clear message to people still at the department: if you want to keep your job, disagreement won’t be tolerated.”Similarly, Barbara McQuade, a former prosecutor for Michigan’s eastern district who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, warned that Bondi’s memo setting up a “weaponization working group” actually “weaponizes law enforcement and undermines public confidence in government” because it pushes a “false narrative” about the two investigations of Trump by the former special counsel Jack Smith.McQuade emphasized that “in fact federal grand juries returned indictments in both cases, meaning that they found probable cause that the crimes were committed. DoJ’s Principles of Federal Prosecution prohibit prosecutors from making charging decisions on the basis of partisan politics.”Pointing to a further symbol of the justice department’s politicization under Bondi, McQuade cited her statement that a federal judge “supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans” and charged he “cannot be objective” because he issued a temporary restraining order blocking deportation of Venezuelan men to El Salvador without due process.“There is no evidence to suggest that the judge did anything other than apply the law to the case,” McQuade stressed. “He was applying the law to a highly suspect use of the Alien Enemies Act, a statute to be used during wartime.”Assessing Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice, Rosenzweig said the department was betraying its historic mission to protect the rule of law.“DoJ isn’t just another department like agriculture or HHS. It has a unique place in the US government as the home of the ‘rule of law’ and the guardian of what makes America special,” he said.“Thomas Paine said: ‘In America, the law is king.’ Trump wants to make his word the law and himself the king.” More

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      Justice department sues Michigan and Hawaii over climate suits against big oil

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      The US justice department on Wednesday filed lawsuits against Hawaii and Michigan over their planned legal action against fossil fuel companies for harms caused by the climate crisis, claiming the state actions conflict with federal government authority and Donald Trump’s energy dominance agenda.The suits, which legal experts say are unprecedented, mark the latest of the Trump administration’s attacks on environmental work and raise concern over states’ abilities to retain the power to take climate action without federal opposition.In court filings, the justice department said the Clean Air Act – a federal law authorizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate air emissions – “creates a comprehensive program for regulating air pollution in the United States and ‘displaces’ the ability of states to regulate greenhouse gas emissions beyond their borders”.The justice department argues that Hawaii and Michigan are violating the intent of the act that enables the EPA authority to set nationwide standards for greenhouse gases, citing the states’ pending litigation against oil and gas companies for alleged climate damage.Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, last year tapped private law firms to go after the fossil fuel industry for negatively affecting the state’s climate and environment.Meanwhile, Hawaii’s governor, Josh Green, another Democrat, plans to target fossil fuel companies that he said should take responsibility for their role in the state’s climate consequences, including 2023’s deadly Lahaina wildfire.When burned, fossil fuels release emissions such as carbon dioxide that warm the planet.Both states’ laws “impermissibly regulate out-of-state greenhouse gas emissions and obstruct the Clean Air Act’s comprehensive federal-state framework and EPA’s regulatory discretion”, the justice department’s court filings said.The justice department also repeated the Republican president’s claims of a US energy emergency and crisis. “At a time when states should be contributing to a national effort to secure reliable sources of domestic energy”, Hawaii and Michigan are “choosing to stand in the way”, the filings said.A spokesperson for the office of the Democratic Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, deferred to Nessel when asked for comment.“This lawsuit is at best frivolous and arguably sanctionable,” Nessel said in a statement, which noted that Michigan had not filed a lawsuit. “If the White House or big oil wish to challenge our claims, they can do so when our lawsuit is filed; they will not succeed in any attempt to pre-emptively bar our access to make our claims in the courts. I remain undeterred in my intention to file this lawsuit the president and his big oil donors so fear.”Green’s office and the Hawaii attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.But legal experts raised concern over the government’s arguments.Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said usual procedure was for the justice department to ask for a court to intervene in pending environmental litigation – as is the case in some instances across the country.While this week’s suits are consistent with Trump’s plans to oppose state actions that interfere with energy dominance, “it’s highly unusual”, Gerrard told the Associated Press. “What we expected is they would intervene in the pending lawsuits, not to try to pre-empt or prevent a lawsuit from being filed. It’s an aggressive move in support of the fossil fuel industry.“It raises all kinds of eyebrows,” he added. “It’s an intimidation tactic, and it’s telling the fossil fuel companies how much Trump loves them.”Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has previously consulted on climate litigation, said this week’s lawsuits look “like DoJ grasping at straws”, noting that the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, said his agency was seeking to overturn a finding under the Clean Air Act that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.“So on the one hand the US is saying Michigan, and other states, can’t regulate greenhouse gases because the Clean Air Act does so and therefore pre-empts states from regulating,” Carlson said. “On the other hand the US is trying to say that the Clean Air Act should not be used to regulate. The hypocrisy is pretty stunning.”The Trump administration has aggressively targeted climate policy in the name of fossil fuel investment. Federal agencies have announced plans to bolster coal power, roll back landmark water and air regulations, block renewable energy sources, and double down on oil and gas expansion. More

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      Judge rules Alien Enemies Act does not allow White House to deport alleged gang members

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      The 18th-century Alien Enemies Act does not authorize Donald Trump to deport Venezuelan immigrants alleged to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang, a federal judge in Texas ruled on Thursday.The ruling from US district judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr is significant because it is the first sweeping and permanent injunction directly addressing whether the government can use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to deport alleged members of Tren de Aragua. Other judges have issued similar but more limited and preliminary rulings.The decision applies only to migrants detained in Rodriguez’s judicial district, the southern district of Texas, which includes Brownsville, McAllen and Houston. Trump appointed Rodriguez to the federal bench in 2018.Trump invoked the act in March declaring Tren de Aragua (TdA) a foreign terrorist organization that was invading the US. The rarely used law allows the president to deport people without full due process in times of war. The law is supposed to apply whenever there is a war between the United States and a foreign nation and when there is “any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States”.“While the Proclamation references that TdA members have harmed lives in the United States and engage in crime, the Proclamation does not suggest that they have done so through an organized armed attack, or that Venezuela has threatened or attempted such an attack through TdA members,” Rodriguez wrote in a 36-page opinion. “For these reasons, the Court concludes that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and, as a result, is unlawful.”The Trump administration has relied on the law to aggressively deport Venezuelan migrants, defying temporary injunctions from other judges telling the White House to halt the removals.On 7 April, the US supreme court ruled that those being removed under the law needed to be provided adequate notice that they were being removed under the Alien Enemies Act so that they might be able to file a legal challenge. Less than two weeks later, the supreme court ordered a halt to a deportation of migrants in Texas after being presented with evidence they weren’t being given adequate chance to file their removals. More

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      Why is the US sleeping as autocracy approaches? | Governor Jay Inslee

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      When a woman asked me a couple of weeks ago why leaders were not standing up to Donald Trump, my thoughts went immediately to political leaders. When I started to answer, she corrected me and said: “No, no, I’m talking about college presidents and law firms. Where the heck are they?”Where indeed? From all observations, most have been asleep as the US president dismantles democracy piece by jeweled piece. They are either cutting sweet little deals on their knees, or just remaining silent as the fruits of 250 years of national labor and life are strangled by Trump’s tentacles. From the cowering of major media companies to the shameful capitulation of some law firms, and oppressive silence from virtually all of them, the nation is sleepwalking into a slow but ever encroaching totalitarian state.As the woman continued her outpouring of anger and grief, I thought of John F Kennedy’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, Why England Slept, his brilliant exposition of why a proud and resilient nation ignored Germany’s mounting threat to their democracy when it was so obvious and imminent. Kennedy recognized the centrality of moments we now face, writing: “Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It’s the system that functions in the pinches that survives.” We are now being pinched by an autocrat who eats laws for breakfast and will not be stopped by any internal restraint.Whether our democracy survives to preserve the rule of law depends on so much more than senators and representatives. In a way, they are merely personal reflections of the public’s will. Depending exclusively on their personal commitment to the constitution is a good bet for the party now in the minority, but a sore loser for the majority party, or more accurately, the majority cult. The moment demands so much more than eloquence on the floor of the House and the Senate – it demands full-throated, continuous and united rebellion against the perverse oppression and malignant illegality of this authoritarian in the White House.Unfortunately, we are not seeing the necessary courage, not in the east, not in the west, not in large law firms, not in boardrooms, not in school district superintendents, not in chambers of commerce. The silence is deafening.Where was the united voice of major law firms when Trump maliciously began to target several of them? They were hiding. Where are the concerted voices of college presidents as their colleagues are being hung out to dry? Do they not teach history at these colleges, where any freshman could tell you that the Trump plan is right out of every autocrat’s playbook? First you tame the press, then you tame the colleges, then you tame the law firms so that no one can even get to court, then you eventually ignore the orders of the supreme court.We are well on our way to that final death knell of democracy, as we advance through the first three steps.My motivation to rally for our country is not driven solely by my love for democracy. Like millions of Americans, I see my own family being jeopardized by Trump’s callousness. I have seen first-hand the power of special education teachers to raise the prospects of special needs kids in my clan. I rebel at the Musk-Trump administration’s chainsaw attack eliminating the one agency that safeguards our kids’ access to special education investments, the US Department of Education. To Elon Musk, the department may be just a bureaucracy – to our family, it is a guardian angel.Is this passivity and lack of resistance understandable? Of course it is. That’s why the old saw “first they come for the … then they come for you” was invented.But we should call upon our college presidents, law firms, leaders of civil society, to get in touch with their responsibility to democracy itself, as well as their own institutions, which surely will end up on the firing line someday if Trump continues to be emboldened by his victims’ servility.Perhaps it is too strong to refer to these organizations as collaborators. Perhaps. But this wholesale timidity and collapse must be considered rank appeasement at best, modest complicity at worst.Kudos to Harvard University, Perkins Coie and others who have stood up, but some of the finest higher educational institutions in world history are now ignoring the well-trod path of autocracy in world history. Some of the best and brightest law firms in the nation are now providing free legal services to the very administration that has broken laws beyond counting the very legal codes the law firms purport to defend.Certainly, these silent aiders and abettors can explain their individual decision making, but their cumulative damage to the very fabric of democracy calls us to heed Benjamin Franklin when he said we must “all hang together, or all hang separately”. Is it asking too much for the college presidents of the US to band together and say this choking of research funds is unacceptable? Are the law firms just too busy to all say they are not going to yield to Trump’s perverse bullying and say what any good lawyer ought to say: “We’ll see you in court”?In fighting Trump’s assaults on democracy, I speak from experience. As the first governor to come out against his Muslim ban, one of the most vocal in speaking out against his Covid negligence, and telling him to his face to stop tweeting and start protecting our children, earning me the honor of being called a “snake”, I know standing up brings the heat. So be it.But my more important experience is decades watching a courageous citizenry force its federal government to change course. In the 50s and 60s, the government was forced to change, thanks in large part to a woman refusing to sit in the back of the bus. In the 70s, the Vietnam war ended only because thousands marched, including myself, proving the ability of committed people, though unelected, to compel change. In the 80s it was private citizens who forced the federal government to start treating HIV patients like humans.In each of these decades, small acts of defiance led to national change as courage rippled outwards. The benefit of having lived these decades during the American experiment is learning that leaders in civil society who resist should be exalted, joined, and followed.Those who believe that this call to action is an overstatement of the threat understand neither the nature of the tyrant-in-chief nor the slow but inexorable nature of how democracies are lost. I witnessed Trump’s cruelty and lack of empathy as I dealt with him during the Covid pandemic, as he willfully withheld help and then consciously spread misinformation that caused so many needless deaths. Anyone who saw this up close would make the call for resistance I am making today. How can anyone not understand that the refusal to follow the law on January 6 continues in full force today? Why would it stop unless it is made to stop?More importantly, we should listen to the late Justice William O Douglas, who said: “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” It is past time for all our leaders in civil society to wake up, stand up and speak up. We are right in calling them to do so. Hiding is no longer acceptable.

      Jay Inslee served as the governor of Washington from 2013-2025 More

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      The FBI’s arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan is a bid to silence dissent | Moira Donegan

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      On Friday, the Trump administration dramatically escalated its assault on the courts when the FBI arrested Hannah Dugan, a county circuit court judge handling misdemeanors in Milwaukee – allegedly for helping an undocumented man avoid abduction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents outside her courtroom. The arrest, a highly publicized and dramatic move from the Trump administration, seemed designed to elicit fear among judges, government bureaucrats and ordinary Americans that any effort to slow, impede or merely not facilitate the administration’s mass kidnapping and deportation efforts will lead to swift, forceful and disproportionate punishment by Donald Trump allies. Her arrest may be the opening salvo of a broader Trump assault on judges.Even if you believe the FBI’s allegations, their account of Dugan’s alleged misconduct is trivial and flimsy, wholly undeserving of the administration’s sadistically disproportionate response. The FBI claims that earlier this month, on 17 April, when an undocumented man was in Dugan’s Milwaukee courtroom charged with misdemeanor battery, she learned that Ice agents were waiting in a public hallway to arrest him. Later, in her courtroom, when she saw the defendant moving toward a main exit, she told the man, “Wait, come with me,” and directed him towards a side door instead. (He was captured by Ice shortly thereafter.) The FBI arrested her in her courtroom and has indicted her on two federal felony charges: obstruction and “concealing an individual”.The presence of Ice agents looking to abduct, detain and deport various undocumented people has long been a problem in local courthouses, keeping municipalities from interacting officially with their residents and slowing the pace of court business as undocumented people have become reluctant to show up at courthouse buildings, be it to face criminal charges, as the man in Dugan’s case was doing; to tend to civil matters; or to report crimes or pursue restraining orders against abusers. As a result, many local judges and administrators have criticized Ice’s operation policies, alleging that the agency’s aggressive tactics to enforce federal immigration law have obstructed their own ability to enforce local law. This is a distinct issue from the legality of Trump administration’s immigration crackdown tactics, which have also been challenged by a number of judges at the state and local level. The justice department has reportedly encouraged federal prosecutors to press charges against state and local officials who oppose the administration’s immigration policies.At the Milwaukee courthouse where Dugan works, Ice agents had already made two high-profile arrests of undocumented persons there to conduct official business, actions that sent a chilling effect through the local community. (The defendant in question in Dugan’s court that day was there on a domestic violence charge; because Ice decided to appear there to arrest him on civil immigration charges instead, the proceedings had to be abruptly halted. The victims, who were present in the courtroom, did not get their chance to see justice served.) When she learned of the presence of Ice agents outside her courtroom door, the FBI alleges, Judge Dugan asked the Ice agents to leave, and pointed out that they did not have the correct warrants. She also allegedly called the situation “absurd”.The absurdity was only beginning. After capturing Dugan’s defendant, the Trump administration evidently sought to make an example of Dugan, and concocted the trumped-up felony charges in order to criminalize her objection to their presence in her courthouse. After orchestrating her arrest, the FBI’s embattled chief, Kash Patel, tweeted gloatingly about Dugan’s capture; then, he quickly deleted the post, only to put it up again later. The FBI seems to have procedurally expedited the charges against her, having her indictment issued by a magistrate judge rather than a grand jury, and arresting Dugan rather than giving her the opportunity to turn herself in. They seem to have been going for maximum drama. For her part, Dugan – a well-known progressive in Milwaukee legal circles who spent much of her career working as a public-interest legal aid attorney – said nothing at her arraignment on Friday. Her attorney told the press, “Judge Dugan wholeheartedly rejects and protests her arrest,” adding: “It was not made in the interest of public safety.”Indeed it was not. Instead, Dugan’s arrest was made in the interest of shoring up the Trump administration’s depictions of itself as lawless, fearsome and impervious to constitutional checks on its own power. It was made in the interest of intimidating the administration’s critics and opponents. And it was made in the interest of silencing dissent.The Trump administration has been rapidly accumulating political prisoners. It began with immigrants who voiced opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza: Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, the graduate students who had their legal status revoked in retaliation for their pro-Palestinian opinions and who were kidnapped by the Ice secret police and shipped off to faraway prisons without process, are political prisoners. Dugan’s, too, is a political prosecution: what is at stake is not so much the law that that meager little comment – “Wait, come with me” – supposedly broke. Instead, it is that Dugan opposes the Trump mass deportation project, and she voiced that opposition in public. Her arrest is an expansion of the Trump regime’s determination into who can be made a political prisoner: with Dugan, that designation extends, in public fashion, to citizens, and even to judges. You should expect that it can expand to you.Dugan’s example is meant to frighten Americans into submission. But I think it might be more likely that she inspires us to subversion. Legality and morality are different things, and what Dugan allegedly did, whether or not it was technically legal, was supremely moral, and not a little bit brave: she refused to cooperate with a secret police force that was there to violate her courtroom, disappear her defendant, and interfere with her own distribution of justice. Doing the morally right thing – opposing Ice and mass deportations with our actions, in practical terms – will require courage from more and more of us, and a greater and greater willingness to face consequences for it.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump disdains conservatism. His governing philosophy is absolute power | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump issued his declaration of war against his “enemies within” at the Department of Justice on 14 March. Thus the president launched a constitutional crisis that encompasses not just a group of migrants snatched without due process and transported against federal court orders to a foreign prison, but a wholesale assault on virtually every major institution of American society.“We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. We will expose, and very much expose, their egregious crimes and severe misconduct,” he pledged. “It’s going to be legendary.”Trump’s speech condensed his mission to its despotic essence. While he distilled his contempt, Trump also marked his disdain for the traditional conservatism of limited government, respect for the law and liberty. He defined his project, built on his executive orders as substitutes for the law, to crown himself with unrestrained powers to intimidate, threaten and even kidnap. His political philosophy is a ruthless quest for absolute power.Trump hailed his appointees for being “so tough” – the enthusiastically compliant attorney general, Pam Bondi, and the irrepressible flunky FBI director, Kash Patel. He attacked lawyers whose firms he would issue executive orders against to eviscerate their work – “really, really bad people”. He claimed Joe Biden and the former attorney general Merrick Garland “tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third-world country”. And he described “people that come into our country” as “stone-cold killers. These are killers like – they make our killers look nice by comparison. They make our killers look nice. These are rough, tough people with the tattoos all over their face.” Trump’s accusations are invariably projections of his own malice that he manufactures into politically pliable paranoia.No staff attorneys within the department were invited to the speech, as people at the justice department told me. The senior lawyers from the Public Integrity Section had already resigned when Trump attempted to coerce them to participate in dropping the prosecution of New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, for corruption in exchange for his support of Trump’s coming roundup and deportation of migrants. After Trump, a convicted felon, concluded by comparing himself to Al Capone, the mafia boss convicted of tax evasion – “the great Alphonse Capone, legendary Scarface, was attacked only a tiny fraction of what Trump was attacked” – Trump’s theme song from his political rallies, YMCA, blared out of the loudspeakers in the department auditorium.The next day, Trump announced his executive order citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1789, a wartime measure, to incarcerate members of the Tren de Aragua gang he asserted were coordinating with the Maduro government of Venezuela to commit “brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking”. (On 20 March, the New York Times reported: “The intelligence community assessment concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders, according to the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.”)The 238 men abducted were taken without any due process to a maximum-security prison operated by the Salvadorian strongman Nayib Bukele, who calls himself “the coolest dictator” and whose government is being paid at least $6m in an arrangement with the Trump administration.In a hearing on 24 March before the US court of appeals for the DC circuit, Judge Patricia Millett, criticizing the absence of due process, said: “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.” She asked the deputy assistant attorney general, Drew Ensign, arguing the administration’s case: “What’s factually wrong about what I said?”“Well, your Honor, we certainly dispute the Nazi analogy,” he replied.Trump’s assertion of emergency power under the Alien Enemies Act is more than a bit analogous to the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the chief legal scholar and apologist of the Nazi regime, “crown jurist of the Third Reich”. The falsity, according to the intelligence community, of Trump’s claim about the men underlines the analogy of Trump’s argument to Schmitt’s. “Authority, not truth, produces law,” Schmitt wrote. “Sovereign is he who decides on invocation of the state of emergency.” And then: “Der Ausnahmefall offenbart das Wesen der staatlichen Autorität am klarsten” – “The State of Emergency reveals most clearly the essence of the authority of the state … The exception is thus far more important that the ordinary rule. The normal state of affairs shows nothing; the emergency shows everything; it confirms not only the rule, rather the rule derives strictly from the emergency.”The ACLU filed a lawsuit on 15 March before Chief Judge James Boasberg of the US district court of the District of Columbia to halt the flight to El Salvador. The judge issued an order for the planes to return to the US, but the Trump administration defied it.Trump’s defiance has set in motion a flurry of legal challenges and court cases heard in district courts and circuit courts of appeals, as well as the supreme court. On 7 April, the court ruled that the detainees had the right to due process, which they were denied. On 11 April, the justices unanimously ordered the administration to facilitate the return of one wrongly taken individual, Kilmar Ábrego García, a legal resident of Maryland who was identified by his family and had no criminal record. On 19 April, the court temporarily blocked a new round of deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.CBS’s 60 Minutes reported: “We could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans.” Bloomberg News reported that about 90% had no criminal records.On 14 April, Trump welcomed Bukele to the White House. Trump has turned the Oval Office into his small stage with cabinet secretaries and staff seated on the couches as his chorus. Bukele was dressed in black casual wear, but not admonished, as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy was admonished, for supposedly showing disrespect to Trump by not appearing in a suit and tie.Trump and Bukele played the scene as a buddy movie, kidding each other, but not kidding, about repression. “Mr President,” said Bukele, “you have 350 million people to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That’s the way it works, right?”“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” said Trump. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”“Yeah, we got the space,” Bukele said.When the question of Ábrego García was raised by a reporter, Bondi said: “That’s not up to us,” and that it was “up to El Salvador”.“Well, I’m supposed – you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist in the United States, right?” Bukele replied. Trump reassured him: “It’s only CNN.” Bukele called the question “preposterous”.“Well, they’d love to have a criminal released into our country,” said Trump. “These are sick people. Marco, do you have something to say about that?” It was another test of the secretary of state’s sycophancy. Marco Rubio rose to the occasion. “No court in the United States has a right to conduct a foreign policy of the United States,” he said. “It’s that simple. End of story.”Standing behind Rubio, Trump’s most influential aide and the architect of his immigration policy, Stephen Miller, chimed in: “To Marco’s point, the supreme court said exactly what Marco said. That no court has the authority to compel the foreign policy function in the United States. We won a case 9-0. And people like CNN are portraying it as a loss, as usual, because they want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children.”A reporter attempted to point out that the court had in fact ruled it was illegal to deprive the captives of due process. “Well, it’s illegal to, so I just wanted some clarity on it,” he asked. Trump jumped in: “And that’s why nobody watches you anymore. You have no credibility.”On 17 April, the day the supreme court ruled on Ábrego García, Trump said: “I’m not involved in it,” though he had signed the executive order that authorized his kidnapping. Trump was reverting to the tactic of denial, however patently ludicrous, that he had been schooled in originally by Roy Cohn, the Republican power broker and mafia lawyer who had been his private attorney. The Trump administration continues to claim it has no control over the captives in the Salvadorian prison and they cannot be returned.Trump’s disavowal of responsibility made the visit to the prison by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to tape a video on 26 March problematic on several levels. If Trump has no control, then how was Noem allowed the run of the place? If the prisoners were combatants under the Alien Enemies Act, then their status made her appearance a violation of the Geneva convention’s Article 1 that outlaws “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment”, and Article 13 that prohibits “acts of violence or intimidation” and “insults and public curiosity” – that is, using prisoners for propaganda purposes.If Schmitt’s argument is not Trump’s argument, the difference has certainly not confused the judges handling the cases. Boasberg ruled that the Trump administration had acted with “willful disregard” for his order and, while contempt proceedings were paused, threatened to appoint a special prosecutor if the Department of Justice declined to do so.The Maryland federal judge Paula Xinis, who ordered the administration to return Ábrego García, said on 15 April she had seen no evidence of progress. She ruled on 22 April that such stonewalling “reflects a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations … That ends now.”She also stated: “Defendants must supplement their answer to include all individuals involved as requested in this interrogatory.” That discovery process might range into stranger precincts of Maga depths than imagined. The New Yorker reported on “a Maga salon” at a tech billionaire’s Washington residence to which a Republican lobbyist, Andrew Beck, brought Trace Meyer, self-described as the “Babe Ruth of bitcoin”, where they discussed with state department staffers the “work-in-progress plan” for abducting migrants to El Salvador. The officials had reached “an impasse in the negotiations. Meyer, through his crypto connections, was able to help reopen the conversation.” Add to the discovery list: Beck, Meyer and the state department officials.In denying the Trump administration’s motion for a halt in the Xinis ruling, Judge J Harvie Wilkinson III, of the court of appeals for the fourth circuit, issued a thunderous opinion on 17 April, marking a historic break between principled conservatism and Trump’s regime. Wilkinson is an eminent conservative figure within the judiciary, of an old Virginia family, a clerk to Justice Lewis Powell, and a Ronald Reagan appointee revered in the Federalist Society.“The government,” Wilkinson wrote, “is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”Wilkinson concluded with a siren call about Trump’s threat. “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.”Wilkinson has defined the stark conflict headed toward an unstoppable collision. Against Trump’s appropriation of Schmitt’s authoritarian logic, the conservative jurist has thrown down the gauntlet of American constitutional law. Trump’s disdain for that sort of conservatism moves the cases again and again toward the conservative majority of the supreme court, which must decide its allegiance, either like Wilkinson, to the constitution, or instead to Trump’s untrammeled power that would reduce the court itself to a cipher.

      This article was amended on 27 April 2025; an earlier version stated that JD Vance admonished Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit to meet Donald Trump. In fact, it was Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice.

      Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      Pam Bondi rescinds Biden-era protections for journalists

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      Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has revoked a Biden administration-era policy that restricted subpoenas of reporters’ phone records in criminal investigations.An internal memo, first reported by ABC News, shows Bondi rescinding protections issued by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, for members of the media from having their records seized or being forced to testify in the course of leak investigations.The memo says federal employees who leak sensitive information to the media “for the purposes of personal enrichment and undermining our foreign policy, national security, and government effectiveness” are engaging in conduct that could be characterized as “treasonous”.“This conduct is illegal and wrong, and it must stop,” the memo states. The justice department “will not tolerate disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people”.Bondi’s memo states that she has concluded that “it is necessary to rescind Merrick Garland’s policies precluding the Department of Justice from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks”.But, she said, the department would continue to employ procedural protections to “limit the use of compulsory legal process” to obtain journalists’ records, acknowledging that a “free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.Under the new policy, Bondi wrote, the attorney general “must also approve efforts to question or arrest members of the news media”.The move comes after Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said she had made multiple criminal referrals to the justice department related to alleged leaks in the intelligence community.One of the leaks included information leaked to the Washington Post, Gabbard told Fox News on Wednesday. She went on to describe the leakers as “deep-state criminals” with “partisan political purposes to undermine President Trump’s agenda”.In 2022, Garland issued regulations to restrict how federal prosecutors could pursue leak investigations, following revelations that justice department officials under the previous Trump administration had secretly obtained the phone records of reporters at the Washington Post, CNN and the New York Times.Bondi’s memo comes as Donald Trump, who has frequently branded journalists “the enemy of the people”, has escalated his attacks on the US media landscape since returning to the White House in January.The new Trump administration’s war on the press has included seizing control of the White House press pool from news organisations, engaging in a highly publicized dispute with the Associated Press over the wire agency’s decision not to adopt the name Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico into its stylebook, and moving to dismantle Voice of America (VoA).The justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More