Hey everyone. Happy Tuesday and welcome back.
Our top story today: the courts keep doing their job and are ruling against the Trump Administration over and over again. A federal judge just torched the DOJ’s attempt to use the grand jury as a weapon against the President’s political enemies in Minnesota. And a separate judge shut down the administration’s secret national voter database. Two rulings. One very clear message: constitutional guardrails still exist. And despite all the noise, the courts are still enforcing them.
We’ll cover Trump’s threat to sue ABC News, growing protests in Albania over Jared Kushner’s luxury resort project, the latest turmoil in Iran talks after Vance downplayed Trump’s comments as “trash talk,” and Tucker Carlson’s split from the Republican Party after 35 years.
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Let’s get to it.
1. The Courts Continue to Slam the Breaks on Trump
Two big court rulings landed Monday. Both of them landed on the wrong side of the Trump administration.
First, in Minnesota — a George W. Bush appointee issued a 29-page ruling throwing out the DOJ’s grand jury subpoenas against Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and a list of other state and local officials the administration had targeted
These subpoenas went out on January 20th of this year. Right in the middle of Operation Metro Surge, the administration’s deportation campaign in Minneapolis that resulted in the deaths of two American citizens and set off mass protests across the state.
And what did the DOJ find to justify going after these officials? The Judge looked at the evidence and said the connections between the information the DOJ was seeking and any possible criminal violation ranged from, in his words, “extremely weak to nonexistent.”
He went on to call it a “blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand-jury process” and connected it to Trump’s well-established pattern of using criminal investigations to retaliate against political enemies. He wrote that the DOJ wasn’t conducting a criminal investigation. It was using the grand jury “for other unlawful purposes.”
The second ruling Monday was just as important. A judge in D.C. struck down the Trump administration’s overhaul of a federal database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE. The administration had expanded this system last year, with help from DOGE, to include the records of natural-born American citizens, link it to Social Security data, and allow states to run bulk searches against it. States like Texas used it to flag registered voters as potential noncitizens and started removing them from the rolls.
The problem: the data was inaccurate. The administration, the judge wrote, “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
Over 60 million voters had their records run through the system. Some American citizens lost their right to vote. One of them had his registration canceled because he didn’t respond in time to a letter demanding proof of citizenship. He’s a natural-born citizen. He had to go prove it in person just to vote in a primary.
The Judge continued: “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
The DOJ hasn’t said yet whether it plans to appeal, but there’s a pattern developing here. This administration has treated the DOJ as a tool of political vengeance, and the courts keep calling the foul.
Yesterday was a good day for the rule of law. Two federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties looked at what this administration was doing and said no. The system is working, but we shouldn’t take it for granted.
2. Trump's New Plan for the Reflection Pool: Sue the People Reporting on It
Yesterday, we told you about the fact that there had been arrests of people accused by Trump of vandalizing the pool, a pool he had once said was so sturdy and well-built that vandalism would be impossible.
Well, things escalated further last night and we want to bring you the latest on that.
The president went on Truth Social and announced he is preparing lawsuits against ABC News over its coverage of the reflecting pool disaster. He accused the network of “false reporting.” He made sure to add: “I like their money, which will be given to the U.S. Treasury!”
This is, of course, the same network that already paid him $16 million to settle a defamation case involving the George Stephanopoulos segment. So in Trump’s mind, this is a strategy that has worked before and one he can get away with.
But here is what actually prompted the lawsuit threat. ABC’s chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl went to the reflecting pool last week. He reached down, picked up a piece of the peeling blue coating that was already loose on the bottom, and held it up so viewers could see what was happening with the peeling paint. That’s journalism.
Like we told you yesterday, Trump responded by claiming Karl was “trying to rip the rubber off of the surface.” But take a look at the video:
Karl was clearly holding up a piece that was already unattached and basically floating to the surface.
Of course, it’s important to note that ABC isn’t the only outlet that’s faced Trump’s legal threats during his second term. He’s sued the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and the New York Times in the last year alone.
Trump’s attacks on journalists and journalism as a practice are unprecedented and one of the more unsettling results of his administration, which is of course plagued by unsettling results. He knows that these lawsuits and threats will intimidate the press and push journalists away from negative coverage of him out of fear of being sued. That is objectively textbook authoritarianism.
We can only hope that these brave journalists continue to hold the president accountable despite the constant threats for doing their jobs.
3. Protests Erupt in Albania Over Jared Kushner’s Resort
This is a story that’s been building for weeks, and it deserves more attention than it’s getting.
Tens of thousands of Albanians have been in the streets protesting a proposed luxury resort on Albania’s coast. The resort is backed by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who has been publicly describing the project in podcast interviews as a dream she and her husband have had for years.
The project sits on protected coastline near a lagoon that conservation groups say is critical habitat for hundreds of bird species. One sea turtle nest was destroyed when bulldozers moved in. The public was given no notice or consultation.
It gets more complicated when you hear that among the investors backing the project are two Qatari brothers, wealthy Syrian-born businessmen with close ties to the Qatari royal family.
Take a look at the scale of the protests in Albania, a country with only two-and-a-half million people by the way.
Now, Qatar is simultaneously a keeper of Iranian funds, the setting for Iran peace diplomacy, a financial backer of a Kushner family resort project, and the donor of the president’s personal plane.
The protesters aren’t just angry about the resort. They’re angry about what that resort represents, which involves a government that sold access to a protected piece of their coastline to Qatar which has political connections to the most powerful country in the world.
This is a story worth watching, especially given how many threads from this lead directly to the Oval Office. There are also plenty of foreign policy implications here. If Albanians are successful in forcing their government to abandon the plans to build the resort, there’s a real chance Trump seeks some form of retribution or at least makes a controversial Truth Social post that sours relations with yet another NATO ally. It’s just unfortunate we have to worry about the president carrying out personal vendettas with countries that are supposed to be our friends.
4. Trump Threatens Iran Mid-Negotiation, Then Vance Calls It "Trash Talk"
The first round of post-MOU talks took place in Switzerland this weekend, with the US delegation led by JD Vance. In the middle of these talks, the President posted on Truth Social threatening to hit Iran again, and reportedly told Iranian officials, quote, “you won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”
The damage from the President’s statements had to be contained at the bargaining table, as Iran’s lead negotiator publicly warned Trump to be careful with his words. Take a look at how Vance spun it after talks concluded:
So after the President publicly threatened officials involved in ongoing negotiations, his loyal Vice President dismissed it all as “trash talk”, with his only defense being the classic playground excuse of “they started it”.
As for any actual progress, Vance emerged from the talks with a big claim:
Sound familiar? Vance may call it a milestone, but these are the same inspectors Iran allowed under the deal that Trump tore up in his first term. And this time it wasn’t even true, because today Iran’s Foreign Ministry claimed they never agreed to those terms.
This is the pattern we’ve seen over and over in these negotiations. Even after a war that cost taxpayers billions of dollars, inflated gas prices for struggling Americans, and claimed the lives of American troops, the administration is still fighting tooth and nail to reach a deal that falls short of the same one they got rid of.
5. Tucker Carlson Helped Build This Republican Party. Now He Says He's Done With It.
Whether we like it or not, Carlson has been one of the most prominent voices in right wing media for many years now, and was an early and enthusiastic Trump supporter. But listen to what he said about the Republican Party this week:
Now, let me be clear with you. Tucker Carlson and I have had very different politics for a very long time. He has been a vocal defender of the President, through many things that were genuinely indefensible. Many of the ideas, grievances, and talking points he pushed for years have moved from the fringes to the center of Republican politics, leaving no room in the party for moderates like myself.
And that’s what makes this departure so notable. Carlson isn’t walking away from a party that rejected him. He’s actually leaving one that, in many ways, embraced his vision. But for people with influence built on challenging the status quo, it gets complicated when the movement you championed becomes the establishment you condemn.
For years, many of us have warned that the Republican Party was drifting away from conservative principles and towards loyalty tests, grievance, and increasingly extreme rhetoric. Carlson wasn’t one of the people sounding that alarm. In many ways, he helped build that environment.
So while it’s fun for us to watch MAGA turn on itself, let’s not mistake this for a rejection of extremism. Because it’s not. It’s a disagreement about where the Republican Party goes next.
Carlson is leaving because the party won’t go far enough for him. But America doesn’t need a Republican Party that moves further from reality. It needs a Republican Party that rediscovers character, responsibility, and a commitment to the Constitution.
And until that happens, the real divide in American politics won’t be between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between those willing to defend democratic principles and those willing to sacrifice them for power, money, and influence.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Yesterday the Supreme Court again put off deciding whether to hear President Trump’s appeal in the E. Jean Carroll case. That makes fifteen delays since February, with no explanation from the justices. Trump’s lawyers call the suit baseless and say it distracts the President from doing his job. The appeal targets the $5 million a New York jury awarded Carroll in 2023, after finding that Trump sexually abused her in 1996 and later defamed her, a verdict a federal appeals court has already upheld. Every reschedule keeps that money out of her hands, and it has now been more than three years. Trump’s team has also signaled a second appeal built around presidential immunity, which could push any decision into the fall.
Mass firings are underway at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the office that coordinates all eighteen of America’s spy agencies. The White House says the cuts carry out Trump’s order to shrink a bloated office and send staff back to their home agencies, and Trump has said it is full of people who should not be there. ODNI was created after the September 11th attacks to force the spy agencies to share what they know, and it had already shed about 40% of its staff under Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard. This round is expected to hit the National Counterterrorism Center hardest. Pulte is serving in an acting capacity that skips Senate confirmation, has no intelligence experience, and is best known for opening mortgage fraud investigations into Trump’s political enemies.
