A federal appeals court on Tuesday unanimously affirmed an order blocking the Internal Revenue Service from sharing taxpayer addresses with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dealing another defeat to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.

“After the Watergate scandal exposed executive branch abuses of U.S. taxpayers’ information to harass the Administration’s enemies, Congress enacted a prohibition against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sharing tax return information with any other federal agency unless the requesting agency meets stringent conditions,” U.S. Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote at the start of a 32-page opinion.

U.S. Circuit Judges Patricia Millett and Robert L. Wilkins joined the decisions. All three were appointed by former President Barack Obama.

A little more than a year ago, the Trump administration sought to circumvent those rules. ICE placed a request for more than 1.2 million records, and the IRS disclosed roughly 47,000 taxpayer addresses before multiple federal judges blocked the sharing of that information.

Center for Taxpayer Rights, Main Street Alliance, and two labor unions pursued the D.C.-based litigation, represented by the advocacy group Democracy Forward.

Judge Pillard found that the procedure the Trump administration created for sharing taxpayer information was a far cry from the exacting standards Congress demanded in post-Watergate legislation passed in 1976, abandoning an “individualized review” in favor of a “mass, automated review of millions of records at the press of a button.”

The judge reminded the government that violations of the statute carry serious penalties.

“The government and its personnel face steep civil and criminal consequences for willful disclosure of information in violation of section 6103,” she wrote, citing the possible imprisonment and heavy fines under the relevant statute.

Although the IRS argued that stopping it from sharing taxpayer information with ICE would impede criminal investigations, the three-judge panel said: “that’s a gripe with Congress, not the court.”

“The government has no legitimate interest in conducting criminal investigations in violation of the statute,” the order notes.

Swatting down another “weak sauce” argument by the IRS, the appellate court brushed away concerns that the injunction requires a judge’s approval to launch criminal investigations. Such notifications can be made “under seal” to protect investigations from public scrutiny.

“Importantly, the district court’s advance notice requirement reasonably balances the government’s interest in making lawful disclosures with the plaintiffs’ interest in preventing unlawful disclosures that, if made, would likely be difficult or impossible to remedy,” the ruling states.

Democracy Forward’s president and CEO Skye Perryman celebrated the ruling.

“The Trump-Vance administration’s dangerous data sharing policies have resulted in the violation of the privacy rights of millions of Americans, and we are pleased the court has again acted to stop this unlawful behavior,” Perryman told All Rise News. “The privacy laws enacted in the post-Watergate era exist to prevent abuses of power just like this. The administration has already admitted to being careless and irresponsible with our sensitive, personal information, and now yet another court has held the administration in check.”

Read the ruling in full here.

Blocking Donald Trump’s executive order attacking mail-in voting, a federal judge reminded the government that the Constitution hands only states and Congress any powers over election administration.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani wrote in her latest injunction.

In a footnote, the judge quoted Alexander Hamilton’s “The Federalist Papers”: “[T]here were only three ways in which this power could have been reasonably modified and disposed: that it must either have been lodged wholly in the national legislature, or wholly in the State legislatures, or primarily in the latter and ultimately in the former.”

Judge Talwani added: “Notably, the Framers excluded the Executive Branch from any allocation formulation.”

This is the third injunction that she has granted blocking Trump’s executive order. Two of them, issued in the cases of State of California et al v. Trump and League of Women Voters of Massachusetts et al v. Trump, came down before the U.S. Postal Service issued a Final Rule implementing the executive order. The Supreme Court paused one of them, finding the lawsuit wouldn’t be ripe until its implementation.

Her latest order sets the stage for another Supreme Court battle on the constitutional merits of the decision.

The Trump Justice Department is eager to initiate that legal battle.

Solicitor General John Sauer, who is one of Trump’s former criminal defense attorneys, already filed an application to pause an earlier temporary restraining order in an unusual maneuver leapfrogging over the First Circuit, which is the intermediate court of appeals. The ultimate outcome of the appeal could have national implications.

According to a whistleblower, the U.S. Postal Service’s rushed and flawed design of a mail-in voting portal can prevent “millions” of voters from ever receiving their ballots, potentially leading to “catastrophic failure” that can “derail” the midterm elections.

Without commenting on the whistleblower’s disclosure, the judge agreed with the scale of the possible failures.

The Postal Service’s implementation of Trump’s order “threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail,” and the government could provide “no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule,” the order states.

USPS issued the Final Rule fewer than 70 days before the midterm elections.

The order, however, allows states to voluntarily comply with the Postal Service’s Final Rule.

“At the same time, the court has not and will not order injunctive relief that precludes States from voluntarily complying with the Final Rule, consistent with their state laws,” the order states.

Texas sought the ability to participate in the federal government’s mail-in ballot scheme.

Read the ruling in full here.

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Weeks after the collapse of former Olympian David Hearn’s indictment, a judge grilled prosecutors on Friday about why they would want to try to revive charges that they admitted they cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Why isn’t the threat of harassment faced by Mr. Hearn completely different from prosecutions in a normal case?” D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman pointedly remarked on Friday.

Last month, the judge dismissed Hearn’s indictment after a series of admissions from the government made the case unsustainable, and he called today’s hearing to determine whether to throw out the case “with prejudice,” denying the government the opportunity to try prosecuting him again.

Among other things, the government conceded that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool resulted from a “botched installation and not vandalism.” The peeling of the sealant in the relevant section was caused by an “over-spray.” A National Park Service engineer cut the sealant with a knife to contain the damage, and Hearn allegedly pulled an already-peeling section that was of “little or no value.”

‘That could change’

Weighing heavily on the judge’s mind was the felony vandalism statute’s proof of damages of at least $1,000.

The Justice Department concedes it cannot prove that prong of the case beyond a reasonable doubt, and that concession seemed fatal to the judge.

“What future prosecution could ever occur?” Judge Edelman asked.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Spence insisted that the answer to that question would require “speculation,” but the judge noted that the case doesn’t depend on evidence of Hearn’s alleged conduct.

Asked whether the government is currently investigating Hearn, Spence answered: “No.”

“Ten minutes from now that decision could change,” Spence added.

Donald Trump has intensely pressured U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to change her mind, threatening to fire her and claiming that she “choked” on the case and “folded like an umbrella.”

Pointing to those pronouncements, Judge Edelman asked: “How am I to look at these statements as anything other than the Chief Executive urging your office to pursue a prosecution that your office has determined is meritless?”

Instead of answering that question, Spence focused on Trump’s legal power.

“I think that the president’s statements speak for themselves,” Spence said. “He can remove the U.S. Attorney. He can remove me.”

‘Should never have been indicted’

Judge Edelman also sharply grilled the government on its speed in prosecuting Hearn, who was arrested on June 19 and indicted on July 2.

In a typical murder case, Adelman said that prosecutors seek the “full, statutory nine months” to pursue the investigation.

“Why wasn’t that process followed here?” he asked. “Why did this case need to be indicted within two weeks?”

Spence said that the speed was required to deter others from vandalizing the pool.

Judge Edelman pointed out that’s hardly different calculus from a murder case, adding: “That seems like something you’d want to deter also.”

Hearn’s attorney Steve Levin said that the government insisting on the opportunity to bring the case again shows its “bad faith.”

“Why are they seeking to re-indict a case that they’ve admitted should never have been indicted?” Levin asked.

Despite the case against him already having been dismissed, Hearn sat at the defense table flanked by his all-star legal team: Levin, Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann and Michael Bromwich.

Before ending the hearing without a ruling, Judge Edelman said: “You’ll hear from me very shortly on this.”

This is a breaking news story. Visit All Rise News later in the day for updates.

Elon Musk’s company xAI lost its latest request to block a Minnesota “nudification” ban, a state law designed to clamp down on platforms used to create deepfake pornography.

U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank’s rejection of a preliminary injunction is also a defeat for the Trump Justice Department, which backed xAI in the litigation.

“The State has enacted, democratically and nearly unanimously, a civil statute aimed at protecting the public from the undisputed harm stemming from AI-nudification technology and the resulting proliferation of photorealistic sexualized images,” the judge wrote in a 14-page order. “It is evident, and xAI does not dispute, that the state has an interest in curbing the generation of those images. The state’s choice to prohibit the provision of AI tools to users who create such images is a direct response to the unique harms stemming from the new technology and the state’s conclusion that curtailing user violations after harmful images are circulated is not enough.”

Every Minnesota lawmaker, except for one, voted in favor of the state’s ban, which imposes fines of up to $500,000 per violation for platforms that allow users to “nudify” images.

Musk’s company filed a lawsuit alleging that the law violated the First Amendment, and the Trump administration supported xAI, arguing that the Minnesota law went much farther than its federal counterparts and could stifle artificial intelligence technology.

Certain free-speech groups — including the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota and the Foundation on Individual Rights and Expression — believed that some of the language in the law went too far.

Judge Frank found that his ultimate determination on the First Amendment issues would come later, but the “balance of the equities” meant protecting victims by allowing the law to remain in force as litigation continues.

“AI-nudification technology has resulted in a flood of sexualized images and allowed the harmful images to spread online and, in many cases, remain online forever,” the order notes. “At a Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Committee hearing, the Senior Legislative Policy Counsel for RAINN submitted the results of a study conducted after a social media site launched an AI tool allowing users to edit images and post the images with one click. This study examined images created in the first 11 days after the AI tool was launched and found that approximately 65 percent of the photos created were photorealistic sexualized images—amounting to a total of 3 million such images at a pace of 190 images per minute. Roughly 23,000 of the sexualized images were of children.”

The judge made clear that the balance could change later.

“In the future, the Court may also consider whether xAI is entitled to permanent injunctive relief on the merits,” he wrote. “Until then, because xAI has not demonstrated irreparable harm and the balance of harms tips steeply in favor of the State, xAI’s motion for a preliminary injunction is denied.”

In an interview last month, Minnesota State Rep. Jessica Hanson, the chief author of the legislation, told All Rise News that the state would work to protect victims of deepfake porn regardless of the final outcome of the litigation.

Hanson also scorched the Trump administration for backing Musk’s company in this fight.

“We know that child sexual abuse is prevalent at a time when the Epstein class is present, and people are calling on the federal government to prosecute folks in the Epstein files,” Hanson said. “When the same attorney general who the night before court sent a letter to Minnesota court saying that they were in support of xAI on this and kind of warned us to be careful. That same attorney general is the same one that moved Ghislaine Maxwell into a comfortable prison situation. These coincidences really can't be denied.”

Watch the full interview with Rep. Hanson on Legal AF’s All Rise News playlist, and read the judge’s order in full here.

With the countdown clock ticking before the midterm elections, a federal judge made clear on Thursday that now isn’t the time for experimental overhauls on mail-in voting administration.

“We are 70 days from the election and I have nothing from the USPS about how this will happen," U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani told a Justice Department attorney, according to the Associated Press.

Talwani is presiding over two lawsuits challenging Trump’s mail-in voting executive order: the State of California et al v. Trump, filed by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general, and League of Women Voters of Massachusetts et al v. Trump, filed by advocacy groups.

As both cases returned to her courtroom on Thursday, Talwani appears likely to affirm her previous conclusion that Trump’s executive order is unconstitutional. Democracy Docket reported that Talwani vowed to “get out my decision as soon as possible,” but she didn’t specify a time.

The Supreme Court paused one of Talwani’s earlier injunctions on procedural grounds, finding that the U.S. Postal Service hadn’t yet issued its Final Rule implementing Trump’s order.

Now that the Postal Service has done so, the case appears to be primed for a return trip — potentially on the merits.

Although a blue-state coalition is opposing Donald Trump’s mail-in voting executive order, Texas reportedly appeared in court to support the plan, urging the judge to let the Lone Star State collect “real world evidence” on how it operates.

Talwani reportedly scoffed at the request for a “test run” so close to the election.

“We’re not talking about an intellectual puzzle game,” she said, according to Democracy Docket. “We’re talking about people’s right to vote.”

Days before the hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) released a whistleblower’s allegations that the U.S. Postal Service flouted the judge’s prior orders blocking any steps toward implementing the mail-in voting order. The whistleblower said that USPS kept working on a hastily-created and error prone online portal that could trigger a “catastrophic failure” set to “derail” the midterms.

In an interview with All Rise News, the whistleblower’s attorney David Kligerman said that his client believes these dangers can still be averted.

“No one is saying, ‘Don't use mail-in voting,’” Kligerman said. “I think [the whistleblower is] bringing this forward because they want this to be addressed.”

Encouraging the public to remain vigilant, Kligerman encouraged people to continue to trust voting by mail but to stay vigilant: “Historically, it’s been a very safe and effective way to vote, and we are hopeful that that will continue to be the case, and people just need to inform themselves and stay tuned.”

In the immediate term, the whistleblower’s allegations are unlikely to affect Judge Talwani’s ruling: She found that the statement constituted “hearsay” brought to the court outside the record, according to independent journalist John Hawkinson.

But a USPS official confirmed the existence of the portal following the hearing in a sworn declaration.

“We anticipate being in a position to make the Portal available to users for voluntary use by sometime next week,” the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer Steven W. Monteith, a 30-year career official, wrote in a sworn declaration.

Texas is pushing to volunteer to use the system if Talwani’s order allows it.

Look out for my extended interview with the whistleblower later in the week.

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Trump’s attacks on nonprofits

Donald Trump’s reported plan to try to revoke the tax-free status of nonprofits that he doesn’t like has sparked a Senate inquiry.

Late last month, the New York Post reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had been considering targeting George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations for revocation. The Trump administration reportedly hopes to get “a good chunk of the crackdown” over the line before the midterms.

Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Raphael Warnock of Georgia announced on Thursday that they’re seeking information about that plan from Bessent and Internal Revenue Service chief Frank Bisignano.

“Americans of every political persuasion must be able to trust that the IRS applies the tax code objectively under one set of rules,” the senators wrote in a letter. “Organizations that violate section 501(c)(3) should face appropriate enforcement regardless of their politics—and organizations should never face IRS scrutiny because political officials disapprove of their views.”

The reported plan would escalate the Trump administration’s attacks on nonprofits since the SPLC’s indictment earlier this year.

Originally scheduled for October, the SPLC’s trial has been postponed until next April because prosecutors recently indicted its former employee Heidi Beirich. The SPLC sought a speedier trial because of the financial and reputational harm of its ongoing criminal prosecution. Multiple donor-advised funds cut ties with the civil rights group since its indictment.

Read the letter from Senators Wyden and Warnock here.

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Leon Black sues over Epstein probe

Billionaire Leon Block filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday seeking to block the House Oversight Committee from scrutinizing his ties to Jeffrey Epstein by obtaining his non-disclosure agreements with women.

Black’s attorneys, comparing the Committee’s actions to the “Red Scare,” argue that the subpoenas would expose women who have “no known or public connection to Epstein” and do not want to be under the spotlight.

“The subpoenas reach well beyond Mr. Black and are, on their face, overbroad,” the lawsuit states. “As written, they compel production of a vast quantity of agreements of all kinds, including the disclosure of the unredacted identities and private circumstances of women who bargained for confidentiality, whose counsel have affirmatively declined to release Mr. Black from his confidentiality obligations, and who want no association with the Epstein scandal. These women are not before the Committee, received no notice from it, gave no consent to it, and were given no way to be heard.”

In a recent report, Sen. Ron Wyden described Black as “Epstein’s single largest source of funding,” providing more than $170 million for “purported tax and estate planning advice.”

Read Black’s lawsuit here, and check out our prior coverage of scrutiny into the billionaire’s Epstein ties here.

A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s second executive order restricting birthright citizenship, emphasizing that the highest court in the United States made itself perfectly clear the first time.

“The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are ‘citizens at birth,’” U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman wrote in a 36-page memorandum opinion. “Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it.”

In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court reaffirmed by a 5-4 margin that the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution enshrines the right to birthright citizenship. Six justices found that Trump’s first birthright citizenship ban was unlawful, and none of the dissenting justices found there was a categorical rule barring the children of undocumented immigrants from birthright citizenship.

“Barbara effectively invalidated the 2025 Executive Order as unconstitutional and dispelled any doubts about the meaning and scope of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Boardman wrote. “Or so it seemed.”

On Aug. 6, 2026, just one month after the Barbara decision came down, Trump issued his second birthright citizenship executive order. This time, he attempted to ban the children of a parent accused of being an “alien enemy,” a “foreign government employee,” or someone engaged in birth tourism.

Trump claimed that such categories of people weren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, but Judge Boardman easily rejected that position. The Supreme Court construed those exceptions, such as the children of ambassadors, narrowly in the Wong Kim Ark decision — and reaffirmed that finding in Barbara.

“The 2026 Executive Order is almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class for the simple reason that the Supreme Court in Barbara already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth,” Boardman found. “This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them.”

During the first phase of litigation, the Trump Justice Department avoided a constitutional battle on birthright citizenship by challenging nationwide injunctions, which it succeeded in abolishing. The Supreme Court, however, allowed district judges to grant universal relief for class action lawsuits.

Citing that reasoning, Boardman wrote: “This indivisible injunction will ‘benefit the entire class’ by preventing the defendants from denying them the right to citizenship by birth.”

The Trump administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify stripping immigrants of due process rights before, and the judge noted those efforts to observe that the executive order could have been used to deprive Venezuelan immigrants of their constitutional rights to birthright citizenship, including an anonymous plaintiff identified in court papers as “Monica.”

“Even though Monica and her husband ‘are not, and have never been, members of Tren de Aragua,’ […] and even though Andrea and her child’s father are not members of La Nueva Familia Michoacana, their fears that they might be deemed alien enemies are well-founded,” Boardman said. “In the past year, in the immigration removal context, the government illegally removed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to his native El Salvador after the government hastily labeled him an MS-13 member, even though he ‘was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador.’”

Boardman noted that the Trump Justice Department described Abrego’s abduction from the United States as an “administrative error.”

Read the opinion in full here.

Note: An earlier version of this story has been updated to clarify the holding of the dissents in Trump v. Barbara.

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A whistleblower warned that the U.S. Postal Service has been moving ahead with a system for implementing Donald Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting that has been blocked by a federal judge.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the whistleblower’s attorneys summarized in a disclosure. “The whistleblower’s assessment and recitation of the facts around the risky and haphazard development of the project is a compelling warning of catastrophic failure which could derail the midterm elections.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) released the whistleblower report in a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner, which was dated on Monday but publicly released on Tuesday.

“We urge you to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS,” Blumenthal told Steiner, a former FedEx board member installed into the position at Trump’s urging.

The leader of the group Whistleblower Aid, which represents the anonymous federal employee behind the disclosure, likened the power grab to Julius Caesar’s infamous action before declaring dictatorship.

“We are crossing the Rubicon of American elections,” CEO Libby Liu said in a statement.

“This dangerously defective mail-in ballot process could disenfranchise millions of voters, ensnaring ballots in red tape under the guise of solving a non-existent problem,” Liu continued. “People in states that rely heavily on vote-by-mail will have a more difficult time making their voices heard in our challenged democracy this November.”

Despite a federal judge’s injunction blocking Trump’s executive order, the U.S. Postal Service has been moving ahead with creating a “Federal Ballot Mail Portal,” according to the report.

The whistleblower said that the process for creating the portal has been so “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed” that USPS officials have called it a “shit show.”

“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the disclosure states. “Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process.”

Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court lifted one of two injunctions blocking Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting on procedural grounds, but every judge to have reached the constitutional issue has found Trump trampled over the power of state and federal legislatures to determine voting procedures.

In late August, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani reaffirmed that principle in her most recent order.

“The record continues to lack any evidence regarding fraudulent absentee or mail-in voting,” she wrote. “In any event, the USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote.”

Talwani scheduled a hearing on Thursday at 9 a.m. Eastern Time in the cases brought by a coalition of state attorneys general led by California and advocacy groups led by the League of Women Voters.

The whistleblower accused the government of defying Talwani’s order in the latter case.

“Moreover, the whistleblower fears that work to develop the portal and related election ballot mail IT system systems violated the injunction and subsequent TRO while issued and active in League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump,” the disclosure states.

On Monday, the Trump Justice Department brushed aside the concerns about the executive order as “doomsday” predictions.

“The Postal Service will not determine voter eligibility, ballot content, mailing or receipt deadlines, or ballot-counting procedures,” the DOJ claimed in a new filing. “The rule does not displace a single state election law. And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”

The whistleblower asked Congress to submit the allegations to the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General for “fear that OIG processes across the federal government have been rendered unsafe for employees to avail themselves of directly.”

Read the whistleblower’s disclosure in full here.

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In a recent sting operation, right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe posed as the brother of Sen. Lisa Murkowski at a polling site in Alaska in order to depict the state’s elections as vulnerable to fraud.

Since O’Keefe said he didn’t have identification, poll workers followed state and federal law by handing him a “questioned ballot,” which has to be reviewed by a bipartisan board to determine whether the voter is qualified.

Election expert Stephen Richer said in an interview that O’Keefe didn’t capture poll workers doing anything wrong, but the Project Veritas founder himself may have broken the law.

“In pulling this little stunt, [O’Keefe] might have himself committed an unlawful act because Alaska law calls it a Class C felony if you are impersonating a voter — and importantly, it says you don't have to have cast the ballot,” Richer said. “You just have to have impersonated the voter.”

O’Keefe himself appears to be aware of the possibility: On his X account, O’Keefe posted a screenshot of a Murkowski staffer stating that a member of his organization “actively engaged in voter fraud.” He characterized that response as a “legal threat to my newsroom.”

For more than a decade, O’Keefe’s undercover sting operations have sparked criminal and civil liability, and he has responded to them by claiming press freedom protections — with a mixed record of success.

In 2010, O’Keefe was prosecuted and convicted of a federal misdemeanor for attempting to enter the New Orleans office of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu under false pretenses. The FBI raided his New York home a little more than a decade later to investigate the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary. Prosecutors ultimately declined to bring charges against Project Veritas or anyone within the organization in connection with that case.

In a series called “Dating the Deep State,” Project Veritas operatives engaged in “honeypot” operations against government employees, capturing them on tape criticizing Trump. Those stunts have sparked civil litigation for, among other things, defamation and alleged violations of federal wiretapping law.

In an extended interview, Richer called O’Keefe’s latest gambit particularly “disgusting” because it invites harassment of innocent poll workers.

“It just makes me so frustrated because these people are not only trying to give to society, but they actually did everything right,” Richer said. “And here is O’Keefe presenting them, painting them as unlawful actors. And it’s all in furtherance of, he would say, promoting the Save America Act [and] trying to get Lisa Murkowski to move on that. But in reality, it’s always James O’Keefe promoting James O’Keefe.”

Watch my full interview with Richer about the O’Keefe affair here, and paid subscribers can see it ad-free below the paywall.

Check out the full All Rise News playlist on Legal AF here.

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That’s the bottom line of a ruling issued on Friday by Senior U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who rejected Trump’s latest attempt to transfer his appeal to federal court.

During a conversation on Substack Live, Glenn Kirschner and I demystified the 35-page opinion and order, which followed both arcane and important legal issues. Among them, the most ominous for Trump were Hellerstein’s findings on the impact of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision.

In Trump v. United States, the Roberts Court created a doctrine of presidential immunity — and decided that it included a new rule prohibiting the use of evidence stemming from official acts against a former president. Judge Hellerstein said that such a rule didn’t apply to a fraud prosecution for Trump covering up hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels to keep the voting public in the dark before the 2016 presidential election.

“The People’s prosecution arises from President Trump’s private conduct surrounding the reimbursement of hush money payments to an adult film star,” Hellerstein wrote. “That conduct, and the challenged evidence, bears no substantive relation to his position in federal office. To consider these facts to be ‘relating to’ a federal office would give the words a definition that is “so broad that it is meaningless.”

Later in the conversation, we discussed the Trump-installed Kennedy Center Board’s sudden decision to hold off on his renovation plan until Oct. 8 — a seeming recognition that it would face a temporary restraining order if it failed to do so.

Watch the video in full at the top of this newsletter.

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The Trump administration’s claim that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is on the verge of financial and structural ruin fell flat before a federal court on Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said that’s no rationale at all for moving ahead with a $250 million renovation plan that’s contingent upon repeatedly dedicating the revamp to Donald Trump.

“Even if that’s true, if it’s unlawful, you can’t do it,” Cooper said, calling the line of argument a “non-sequitur.”

When DOJ attorney Brantley Mayers, counsel to Assistant Attorney General Brett Schumate, started his arguments by claiming the Kennedy Center was in “structural and financial disarray,” Judge Cooper abruptly cut him off.

Before today’s hearing, the Kennedy Center’s Board set a self-imposed Sept. 8 deadline to move forward with a resolution to launch the renovation, which includes inscribing Trump’s name twice on the building — and renaming the Kennedy Center campus as the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

If the Trump-appointed Board won’t move the deadline, Judge Cooper indicated “there may be a bit of a temporary holding pattern while we give these issues the attention they deserve” — hinting at a likely temporary restraining order.

But a TRO might be the least of Trump’s problems.

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‘Financial mismanagement’

Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, filed the lawsuit that successfully led to the removal of Trump’s name from the building in May. She is standing in the way of Trump’s latest plan to make himself the face of a $250 million renovation of the building. (Congress appropriated the money last year.)

But Beatty’s legal team is also pushing for the judge to order the government to produce evidence concerning the stewardship of JFK’s living memorial under Trumpian management.

“Is this all a smokescreen for financial mismanagement?” Beatty’s attorney Nathaniel Zelinsky pointedly asked in court, referring to the plans for a sudden two-year closure of the Kennedy Center for emergency renovations.

The Kennedy Center’s cultural programming has been paused indefinitely amid a mass withdrawal of artists and disappearing audiences. According to the Washington Post, ticket sales dropped in half the week after Trump’s takeover, and revenue kept cratering from there.

On Monday, the Trump Justice Department’s senior attorneys wrote that the Kennedy Center may have to be “taken down” unless the renovation plan gets the green light.

“This is breathtaking,” Zelinksky said. “It’s a not-so-subtle threat.”

The Trump administration blames decades of financial neglect for what it calls the current “crisis,” but the Kennedy Center’s public tax filings show strong net income for years before Trump’s second term.

Citing the Washington Post’s reporting, Beatty’s legal team wants the judge to order the government to disclose more evidence regarding the reason for the Kennedy Center’s sudden closure.

Offering his theory of the Board’s thinking, Zelinsky said: “We’re shutting this thing down to hide our own embarrassment.”

Judge Cooper appeared receptive to granting some form of discovery on that issue.

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‘Tesla Grounds’

Although the Kennedy Center’s cultural programming has been indefinitely suspended, the building remains open for free daily tours on the hour.

A tarp still hangs over the front portico where the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees complied at the eleventh hour to take down Trump’s name, apparently damaging the irreplaceable Italian marble from the region where Michelangelo found the raw material for “David.”

Joining one of the tours would immediately debunk the Trump administration’s claims that the grounds are “structurally unsafe” and “embarrassing to the National Capital.” Without any visible sign of hazards, staffers lead visitors through all three theaters in the main building: the Concert Hall, Opera House and Eisenhower Hall. The Grand Foyer that connects them all stretches to 618 feet, longer than the Washington Monument laid at a horizontal. The same Tuscan marble is on the walls of the Hall of States and the Hall of Nations, where U.S. and world flags greet visitors.

In the Justice Department’s telling, only Trump can save it, and the plan to rehabilitate it hinges upon crediting him twice on the renovation with the inscriptions “Renovated and Restored by President Donald J. Trump” and “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

Judge Cooper’s previous order made clear that Congress forbade renaming the Kennedy Center or creating a memorial for anyone else in it. The Trump Justice Department claims the dedication isn’t a memorial but a dedication for an endowment.

Scoffing at the distinction, Beatty’s attorney said it would leave a “gaping hole” allowing anyone to rededicate or sell off other parts of JFK’s memorial.

“Call it ‘Tesla Grounds,’” Zelinsky said, noting that the so-called “plaza” remains undefined. “Sell it to the highest bidder.”

Zelinsky said that even naming the fundraising entity the Trump Kennedy Center Fund violates the judge’s order — by implying the existence of a Trump Kennedy Center.

Worse, Zelinsky said, the government has said that the board revised its bylaws to claw back donations if Trump’s name were removed from the building.

“How is that not contumacious, your honor?” Zelinsky said.

“I’ll ask your colleague about that,” Cooper countered.

Despite that line, Cooper hasn’t yet raised the prospect of a finding of contempt.

This live coverage of the Kennedy Center hearing was made possible by All Rise News subscribers.

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After failing once to inscribe his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the second time likely isn’t the charm for Donald Trump.

During a roughly two-hour hearing, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper made clear that he’s likely to issue a restraining order if the government doesn’t ditch its self-imposed Sept. 8 deadline to move ahead on a recent Kennedy Center resolution. The Trump Justice Department would not specify exactly what will happen on that date, but it could involve starting construction on inscriptions on the building reading “Renovated and Restored by President Donald J. Trump” and “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

Trump made his latest plan to make himself the focus of a $250 million renovation of the Kennedy Center such an administration priority that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick attended the hearing — after holding a press conference about the cultural landmark’s supposed financial and structural crisis.

After Michael Popok shared a clip from that conference, I described what unfolded inside the courtroom, where Lutnick sat in the first row of the gallery. Cooper, quietly and systematically, laid the groundwork to take action.

Although the Kennedy Center’s programming has been paused indefinitely, the building itself remains open for free public tours. In the video, I describe how those public tours debunk the Trump administration’s messaging about the center and describe what’s likely next for the litigation.

Look out for a more detailed breakdown later in the evening.

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The Third Circuit Court of Appeals declined to dismiss the criminal charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) in the fallout over her oversight visit to an immigration detention facility in Newark.

By a 2-1 margin, the appellate court threw out the bulk of McIver’s claims of legislative immunity and found that it lacked jurisdiction to consider whether she had been vindictively prosecuted.

“To protect the people, their elected representatives must be authorized to conduct oversight of the executive branch without fear of retaliation,” McIver said in a statement. “Today’s decision chills that authority and emboldens the Trump administration to continue persecuting our most vulnerable communities, those who try to defend them, and anyone who dares hold the president or his lackeys accountable. I will not fold to this administration.”

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‘The Constitutional foundation of our government’

In May of last year, McIver joined a congressional delegation to oversee the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark. After the lawmakers arrived, federal agents tried to arrest Mayor Ras Baraka, and McIver tried to intervene by allegedly grabbing one of the agents.

The government’s trespassing case against Baraka ultimately collapsed before trial, but McIver’s federal assault case remains pending.

The New Jersey congresswoman unsuccessfully tried to dismiss her case for selective and vindictive prosecution and lost a related motion claiming that her indictment was barred by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. She appealed that decision to the Third Circuit, where a panel initially appeared to be sympathetic to her case.

On Wednesday, the Third Circuit’s majority mostly ruled against her, finding that she couldn’t appeal the denial of her vindictive prosecution motion before trial.

U.S. Circuit Judge Thomas Ambro, a Bill Clinton appointee, believed that was a mistake.

“Potentially retaliatory prosecutions of sitting Members of Congress are exceedingly rare,” Ambro wrote in a partial dissent. “But when they do occur, the constitutional foundation of our government is at risk.”

Ambro believed that cases of such “exceptional importance and rarity” allow the appellate court to exercise jurisdiction, but he was ultimately outvoted.

“Real harm results from that choice,” he wrote.

U.S. Circuit Judge Cindy Chung, a Joe Biden appointee, wrote the majority opinion and didn’t opine on whether the Trump administration targeted McIver because of her oversight of Delaney Hall, where at least three detained immigrants have died within eight months.

Along with Trump-appointed Judge Stephanos Bibas, Chung found that any appeal would have to wait until after McIver’s trial, but the majority judges found that one of her three charges might be barred under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. They ordered the trial judge to reconsider whether that final count can survive.

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‘Disfavored legislators’

Due to give birth to her second child this autumn, Rep. McIver may be running out of options to avert a trial, and her attorney Paul Fishman has argued that the criminal process itself has a chilling effect regardless of its outcome.

“As we argued before the court, it is too dangerous if the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security are able to thwart members of Congress from inspecting an ICE detention facility, create chaos, and then prosecute those members and pretend it was their fault,” Fishman said. “The goal of the administration is clear: chill members of Congress from overseeing the actions of the Trump administration. As Judge Ambro noted in his dissenting opinion, ‘the Constitution does not permit the Executive to wield its considerable discretion over criminal prosecutions in retaliation against disfavored legislators.’ We agree and are evaluating all possible next steps.”

If convicted of all counts, McIver faces a maximum penalty of 17 years imprisonment, and her defense contrasted her assault charges with the wholesale pardons of violent Jan. 6th rioters, who were convicted under the same statute.

Ambro found the comparison to be apt.

“When assessed against legitimate factors, [the rioters] were far more culpable than she is: many of them were armed, and she was not; they were unlawfully present, and she was not; many of them had criminal records, and she did not; many of them caused injuries, and she did not,” he said.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security launched a pre-trial media blitz against the congresswoman, accusing her of having “stormed the gate” of Delaney Hall in a “bizarre political stunt.”

The government was forced to delete those posts, but McIver wasn’t able to persuade a judge to investigate what role the agency played in her prosecution.

Read the ruling in full here.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s attempt to overturn her sex trafficking convictions failed again on Tuesday, as a federal judge rejected her “meritless” and “frivolous” claims that new evidence from the Epstein Files Transparency Act exonerates her.

“Maxwell’s claims are all meritless and all or almost all are frivolous,” U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer wrote in a 67-page ruling. “The vast majority are procedurally barred—either because Maxwell made and lost the same arguments on direct appeal, or because she could have made such arguments on appeal but elected not to do so. And the purported ‘new’ evidence to which Maxwell points, principally materials released under the [Epstein Files Transparency Act], is largely irrelevant to the charges against Maxwell and does not support her claims of error. On the contrary, to the extent it is relevant, far from exculpating her, it incriminates her or reinforces the correctness of the legal rulings Maxwell challenges.”

In late 2021, Maxwell’s trial brought to light her reputation as Jeffrey Epstein’s “No. 2” and the “lady of the house” who participated in the grooming and abuse of minors and young women. Four of Epstein’s survivors testified against her, and multiple witnesses said that Maxwell touched their breasts in normalizing Epstein’s abuse. A federal jury quickly convicted her on five of the six counts against her, and a trial judge sentenced her to 20 years imprisonment.

Although her appeals failed all the way up to the Supreme Court, Maxwell won a transfer to a more lenient prison last year after speaking with Attorney General Todd Blanche. Once her appeals were exhausted, Maxwell ditched her legal team and filed a pro se petition challenging her verdict in the Southern District of New York.

It didn’t fare any better, but some of her allegations raised eyebrows.

For the first time, Maxwell alleged to have been selectively prosecuted because the government never indicted the four alleged Epstein co-conspirators and “25 men” she said had entered settlements with victims.

Engelmayer called this point “patently frivolous.”

“Maxwell served for years as Epstein’s indispensable recruiter and groomer in chief,” the judge noted. “She does not point to any other person who abetted Epstein in this manner or to this degree. That is fatal to Maxwell’s claim of selective prosecution, because she has not identified, and cannot identify, any offense participant ‘similarly situated’ to her. […] On the contrary, Maxwell has not implicated any other person in the child sex abuse scheme.”

In fact, the judge noted that Maxwell did “not even concede Epstein’s culpability” for the sex trafficking scheme.

As for the supposedly exculpatory Epstein files released by Congress, Judge Engelmayer found that they weren’t worth mentioning beyond stating that they are “at best irrelevant to—and many undermine” Maxwell’s claims.

Read the ruling in full here.

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Trump: Kennedy Center might need to be ‘taken down’

Nice cultural landmark that you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.

In one of its most brazen court filings to date, the Trump Justice Department suggested that losing its latest legal battle over the Kennedy Center might lead to the historic building’s demolition.

The Kennedy Center board has hinged plans for a $250 million renovation on honoring Trump as its patron.

“Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years,” the government’s latest filing states. “Such a replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain.”

Before Trump’s second term, there was never any allegation that the Kennedy Center was on the brink of financial or structural collapse.

On the contrary, nonprofit tax records showed that the cherished cultural landmark was in fine financial health: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts reported more than $306 million in revenue and $266 million in expenses in 2024, the filing shows.

Far from single-handedly rescuing the Kennedy Center from oblivion, the Trump administration has driven ticket sales off a cliff. The Washington Post reported that sales dropped by half the week after Trump’s takeover of the board and kept cratering as artists and audience members alike left in droves. The Kennedy Center’s internal projections reportedly anticipate roughly $124 million in revenue for the 2026 fiscal year, less than half the amount pulled in during the last full year of the Biden administration.

Stacking the Kennedy Center’s board with his loyalists, Trump relentlessly pushed to turn the institution into a monument in his own honor and hitch its continued existence to his glorification.

In previous court filings, the Kennedy Center Board indicated that it revised the nonprofit’s bylaws to require clawing back all donations if the building weren’t renamed “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Multiple federal courts made clear that this poison pill provision doesn’t change federal law, which created the Kennedy Center as a memorial to the assassinated 35th president of the United States, not a shrine to a living one.

After delaying the removal of Trump’s name from the building, the Board plotted an alternative way to put it back up by writing that the building was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” and “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper will hear arguments on whether to block that plan.

The Trump Justice Department has been setting the stage for that hearing by pushing the dubious narrative that the Kennedy Center is in “crisis,” “critical condition” and “terminal decline” — and whose sole possible savior, Trump, is being stymied by a “nakedly partisan” lawsuit by Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio board member.

Although the Kennedy Center board argues that it wants to pay tribute to Trump’s “extraordinary contributions,” Beatty responded that Trump is simply trying to take credit for signing legislation appropriating taxpayer money.

The New York Times quoted an attorney for preservation groups stating: “no one concerned about America’s historic landmarks can afford to treat this as idle speculation,” particularly after the Trump administration razed the East Wing of the White House to the ground — so far, with the Supreme Court’s blessing.

Read the filing here.

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Ex-SPLC officer pleads not guilty

The only former Southern Poverty Law Center employee to be charged to date in the Trump Justice Department’s crusade against the storied civil rights group pleaded not guilty on Tuesday.

Heidi Beirich, the SPLC’s former chief financial officer, waived her appearance in court to enter her plea during her virtual arraignment, which was transmitted via Zoom teleconference.

In her absence, her attorney Michael Proctor indicated that she pleads not guilty to allegations that she engaged in wire fraud and money laundering in connection with the SPLC’s now-shuttered informant program.

Earlier this summer, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post provided an early glimpse into the salacious allegations against Beirich in an article titled “SPLC boss funneled $1.2 million to lover in neo-Nazi group — pair even had joint bank account.”

The prosecution’s claims against Beirich closely mirror that report — down to the allegation that she had a “romantic relationship” with an informant inside the National Alliance. But a more complicated image emerges beneath the tawdry headline.

There is no indication in the indictment that Beirich personally “funneled” that amount of money to the informant, who received money from the SPLC over the course of “over 20 years” — at a rate of roughly $60,000 a year or less. Beirich left the SPLC in 2019, indicating that she didn’t have control over his payments for at least four of the years at issue.

What the SPLC received in return from the informant is a separate story. In 2014, the informant broke into the headquarters of the National Alliance and stole 25 boxes of the neo-Nazi group’s sensitive secrets. Beirich then used that information to publish an exposé titled “Chaos at the Compound,” implicating the extremist groups in alleged tax fraud.

The Trump Justice Department’s theory of the case holds that the SPLC defrauded donors by claiming that they were trying to “dismantle” hate groups when they actually “manufactured ” the racism that they opposed. If that were the case, it would make little sense to implicate a neo-Nazi group in what the SPLC’s post described as a “prosecutable pattern of embezzlement and income tax fraud going back at least 15 years.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kelly Pate temporarily scheduled Beirich and the SPLC institutionally to stand trial on the same date: Oct. 5, 2026.

Revisit my video interview from earlier this summer with investigative journalist Phil Williams about the allegations against Beirich by clicking here.

The Supreme Court lifted one of the injunctions blocking Donald Trump’s executive order attacking mail-in voting before the midterm elections.

In a partisan 6-3 split, the conservative supermajority agreed with Trump’s procedural argument that the lawsuit was filed prematurely, and those justices declined to comment on the lawfulness of Trump’s attempt to federalize mail-in voting, which one federal judge already found to be a wildly unconstitutional usurpation of states’ power over election administration.

“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful,” the majority opinion states. “On that score, time will tell.”

The majority’s ruling sparked two dissents: Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan emphasized in the first that the Supreme Court merely kicked the can down the road for resolution, and they said that outcome was unwarranted.

“Today’s decision does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with States’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful,” they wrote. “Nor does it suggest that the Executive Branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to implement the President’s directives. Instead, today’s decision merely postpones adjudication of those challenges.”

But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson went much further, suggesting that the majority rewarded the Trump administration’s “gamesmanship.”

“Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections,” she wrote.

As previously reported on All Rise News, the Trump administration’s strategy is all in the timing. After arguing that the lawsuit was filed too soon, the government will likely argue that it is too late for courts to block the executive order because of the so-called Purcell principle. That’s named after the Supreme Court’s case of Purcell v. Gonzalez, which established the precedent that judges should not change election rules too close to an election.

In an interview earlier this month, former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin told All Rise News that the Trump administration’s timing arguments were “a kabuki theater-type exercise” to avoid any judicial intervention with a plainly illegal executive order.

“They’re trying to unconstitutionally interfere with the elections,” Platkin said. “They’re trying to tee it up procedurally so it maximizes their chance to get this through for this election because in many respects this election is the ball game, and they want to preserve control of both chambers of Congress.”

One of the two injunctions blocking the implementation of Trump’s executive order remains in place, and the administration will have to overturn the second in order for its attack on mail-in voting to go into effect.

The Center for Election Innovation and Research’s executive director David Becker held out hope for the ultimate outcome, noting that the U.S. Postal Service’s recent issuance of a final rule makes a separate challenge ripe.

“I expect that the states will file a new lawsuit and that this order will remain blocked for 2026,” he said.

As Supreme Court expert Steve Vladeck noted, however, the Purcell issue remains a wild card, and his breakdown of the variables of today’s ruling is a must-read to understand what comes ahead.

All Rise News will report on what happens — and how the affected states will respond if the Supreme Court ultimately allows Trump’s mail-in voting power grab before the midterms.

Read the ruling and dissent here, and revisit my previous interview with ex-AG Platkin below.

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Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC by the numbers

The BBC’s motion to dismiss Trump’s defamation lawsuit against it answers the question: How does Trump even try to justify suing the U.K.’s biggest broadcaster in a Florida court over a documentary that never aired in the United States?

Recall: Trump is suing the BBC over a 12-second edit from its documentary, which captured two of his most incendiary lines from his speech before the Jan. 6th insurrection.

In a $1 billion lawsuit, Trump claims that the documentary defamed him by suggesting that he incited the riot. The BBC’s new motion denies that any such implication is false, let alone defamatory.

Setting aside the First Amendment issues, however, the bulk of the motion captures the absurdity of the jurisdictional hook used to get the lawsuit into a U.S. court. The BBC’s documentary never aired in the United States, and the network actively worked to prevent U.S. viewers from watching it without authorization.

According to the new motion, Trump claims to have found 34 attempts to view the BBC’s documentary without authorization in Florida using a virtual private network (VPN), a technology used to encrypt and disguise web traffic.

At its core, the BBC argues that Trump’s jurisdiction argument amounts to “34 unconfirmed, unauthorized attempts to play the documentary from Florida.” Those attempts came from 10 total users, and they were just “play-starts,” meaning that it’s unclear how much of the documentary was ultimately viewed in this way.

A dismissal of the case might be the best outcome for Trump. The BBC is playing hardball, seeking the testimony of Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and Don Jr., citing the Jan. 6th Committee’s findings about their scramble to push Trump to condemn the violence.

The BBC requested a federal court hearing on its motion to dismiss.

Read the BBC’s motion here.

Trump’s USPS power grab

Just in time for the Supreme Court’s ruling, the New York Times has published an article about Trump’s plans to reshape the U.S. Post Office.

The report begins:

“Four weeks before President Trump signed an executive order seeking to restrict mail voting, he filed four nominations for vacancies on the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service.

All four were Republicans. Three have expressed doubts about who won the 2020 presidential election and the security of voting.

The selections broke with a longstanding practice of nominating board members in bipartisan pairs. Two of those nominees are on a fast track for approval, and could reach a full Senate vote when the chamber returns from recess in September. If confirmed, their appointments would effectively tip the board to a majority that is loyal to Mr. Trump.”

Expect Trump’s machinations with the U.S. Postal Service to become cast into sharper relief as the midterm elections approach. Read the full story here.

A father of two living in the United States did the right thing by agreeing to cooperate with federal prosecutors against drug cartels.

The Trump administration repaid him by trying to deport him three times, finally succeeding on the last attempt and dumping him in an area of Mexico with known cartel activity.

Anonymized in court papers as John Doe, the man is now hiding for his life, and a federal judge has ordered the government to facilitate his return.

“There is an immense public interest in ensuring that persons who risk their personal safety to assist the government in prosecuting wrongdoing are not placed in harm’s way by the very entity they assisted,” U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Trump appointee, wrote in a 16-page opinion.

‘More likely than not to be tortured’

The Trump administration’s quest to deport the cooperator has been relentless, despite clear warnings about the fate that likely awaited him in Mexico.

In June 2024, Doe’s case went before an immigration judge who found that he was “more likely than not to be tortured” upon his return.

Doe’s protections under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) held firm without incident until a Trump-era Immigration and Customs Enforcement took him into custody during a check-in last January.

After a six-month stint in immigration detention, the Trump administration spirited him to Guatemala, which turned him over to Mexico. The Mexican Consulate, who spoke to the man’s attorneys, learned about his CAT protection and returned him to the United States.

The Trump administration wasn’t deterred: According to court papers, the man’s lawyers sought a temporary restraining order in federal court to prevent his deportation, but the government deported him again before it could be adjudicated. The Mexican government, once again, returned the man to the United States.

On the third attempt, the Trump administration terminated Doe’s deferral of removal and claimed that the Mexican government provided assurances that he wouldn’t be harmed back home. A federal judge in Louisiana denied a request for a restraining order, and the government successfully deported him to Mexico without his phone, money or personal belongings.

“He has been in hiding since that date, fearing that the cartels that he provided information against will find him and torture or kill him before he can return to the United States,” Judge Gallagher noted.

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‘Would logically choose not to testify’

This cooperator’s case, astonishing though it may be, hardly stands alone.

In May, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) published a report titled “Acquittal by Removal,” showing how the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda has compromised criminal cases and degraded federal law enforcement’s ability to pursue certain crimes.

By the numbers, Raskin found that the Trump administration diverted more than 28,000 officers from prior positions to meet its anti-immigration goals, including a quarter of its FBI agents, half of its Drug Enforcement Agency officers, and 90 percent of its Homeland Security Investigations agents.

“The reallocation of personnel has led to non-immigration related criminal prosecutions falling to their lowest point in decades,” the report found, citing a 10 percent drop in federal gun prosecutions and an 11 percent drop in narcotics arrests.

“Child exploitation investigations have been cancelled or postponed, fentanyl trafficking checkpoints are unstaffed, and Border Patrol agents are stretched thin, as many of the people who previously worked at ports of entry are being sent throughout the country to do interior enforcement,” the report continues.

The report also spotlights the case of another cooperating witness against suspected cartel members deported before trial, leading to the collapse of the case.

“Javier Hernandez received death threats because of his willingness to testify against two alleged cartel drug smugglers in Los Angeles,” Raskin’s report states. “Despite the threats, he remained a cooperating witness until ICE deported him to Mexico without consulting the federal prosecutors handling the criminal case. Without Mr. Hernandez available to testify, the alleged smugglers were acquitted of all charges.”

Judge Gallagher noted that a system that allows witnesses to be summarily deported without due process protections would face a problem because cooperators “would logically choose not to testify or assist law enforcement.”

That would ultimately harm the government, other cooperating witnesses, and “the American people at large,” the judge noted.

The Trump Justice Department and attorneys for the cooperator did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment.

Read the ruling in full here.

Donald Trump’s attempt to put his name on John F. Kennedy’s memorial despite a federal judge’s ruling forbidding it heads to a federal court reckoning this Thursday.

Nearly three months have passed since U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered the Trump administration to remove his name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” Cooper wrote on May 29, 2026.

Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), who filed the original lawsuit opposing the re-dedication of the Kennedy Center, noted that didn’t end the matter.

In the opening line of a legal brief, her attorney Nathaniel Zelinsky encapsulated Trump’s defiance by quoting baseball legend Yogi Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” The legal brief summarized how we got here:

“The Court ordered Defendants to remove President Trump’s name from the façade […] After waiting until the last possible minute, Defendants complied in the early morning hours of June 13, 2026. In an act of obvious petulance, however, Defendants hung a tarp over the building’s iconic lettering, obscuring President Kennedy’s name from the face of the institution meant to memorialize his legacy.”

“Now, in a new and breathtaking act of defiance of Congress and of this Court, Defendants have voted to return President Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center’s façade. This time, Trump’s name will appear on the building’s front portico not once, but twice. Underneath President Kennedy’s name, it will say: ‘Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump’ and ‘Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.’”

At a hearing on Thursday, Judge Cooper will determine whether Trump will get away with this game of “whack-a-mole.”

“If permitted to proceed, Defendants will openly flout the law, and—as they apparently did the first time they unlawfully tacked President Trump’s name onto the marble edifice—risk added damage to the historic façade,” the brief states. “Plaintiff respectfully requests the Court issue an order permanently enjoining Defendants’ latest actions and put an end to this childish gambit.”

The Kennedy Center’s board indicated that it plans to proceed with construction on Sept. 8.

Rep. Beatty wants Cooper to act before that deadline: “Anything less would do considerable harm to the public’s faith in the rule of law.”

All Rise News will cover the proceedings in Washington, D.C., and that coverage is sustained by support of paid subscribers, who receive access to weekly previews of upcoming court hearings, protests and opportunities for civic engagement.

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The Trump administration and Elon Musk have joined forces once again against a common enemy: a Minnesota state law designed to combat deepfake pornography.

Earlier this week, the Trump Justice Department filed a statement of interest effectively supporting a federal lawsuit filed by Musk’s company xAI opposing Minnesota’s so-called “nudification” ban. Multiple federal laws punish the use of artificial intelligence to create revenge porn and child sexual abuse material, but advocates say those statutes haven’t gone far enough to curb the problem.

That’s why Minnesota became the first state in the nation to pass its own ban, passed with nearly unanimous, bipartisan support in the state legislature and signed by Gov. Tim Walz (D). The law authorizes the attorney general to try to hold companies liable to the tune of up to $500,000 every time a violating image is created by a user, and Musk’s company claims that the statute violates the First Amendment.

Musk’s company xAI, the creator of Grok acquired earlier this year by SpaceX, recognizes the law as a threat to its bottom line. SpaceX already has set aside $500 million to pay out potential liabilities from pending lawsuits, summarized in a legal brief by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.

“Five children brought a class action against XAI, alleging that their photographs were used to create child porn on Grok Imagine,” Minnesota’s legal brief noted. “Two Arkansas families have sued XAI in Arkansas federal court, alleging that Grok was used to generate child porn of their daughters who are under fifteen years old.”

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, SpaceX acknowledged concerns about Grok products offering “more candid, direct, or less reserved or irreverent outputs, such as ‘Spicy’ Imagine mode and ‘Unhinged’ voice mode.”

The Center for Countering Digital Hate, an advocacy group that has been at odds with Musk in the past, published a study revealing the disturbing scale of the problem: “Grok Floods X with Sexualized Images of Women and Children,” estimating that the AI platform created three million sexualized images, including 23,000 of children.

Minnesota’s nudification ban aimed to combat this problem, but it should be noted some civil liberties groups — including the state’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) — expressed concerns about its reach.

Unlike its federal counterparts, the state law makes no exception for a “matter of public concern” such as political satire, and it imposes strict liability on companies without regard to their knowledge of the illicit use of their platforms. A federal judge has allowed the law to take effect, but he hasn’t issued a final ruling on the merits.

The federal government’s intervention in the case this week, however, raises questions about why it’s suddenly entering into this debate on behalf of Trump’s biggest donor.

Reflecting the government’s priorities, the Trump Justice Department sent its third top official Stanley Woodward to submit the legal brief. Woodward represented one of Trump’s co-defendants in the classified documents case, and his firm collected an estimated $1.4 million from Trump’s political action committees for representing his allies.

That raises questions about whether the government’s concern is really protecting “American national and economic security,” as its legal brief claims, or doing a favor for a powerful Trump ally.

All Rise News delved into the controversy with a video showing testimony from victims of deepfakes and the full context of the debate. Watch it here, and paid subscribers can see it ad-free below the paywall.

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Donald Trump might have a “get-out-of-law-free card” after all in the Supreme Court’s shadow docket.

On Friday afternoon, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily lifted an injunction that had blocked above-ground construction of his East Wing ballroom in an emergency docket order that did not state any reasoning.

“IT IS ORDERED that the preliminary injunction entered on April 16, 2026, by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, case No. 1:25-cv-4316, is hereby stayed pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court,” Roberts wrote.

The order pauses an injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, who initially blocked construction of Trump’s East Wing ballroom because of his refusal to seek Congress’s permission to raze and replace the historic building.

Leon later revised his initial order to permit construction on the below-ground security bunker.

The D.C. Circuit’s majority agreed with Leon, finding that Trump sought a “get-out-of-law free card” by circumventing congressional approval.

“The bold assertion that the Executive can act with utter lawlessness, destroying treasured national landmarks and harming the interests of individuals, and that no court can stop it flouts our constitutional order,” U.S. Circuit Judges Patricia Millett and Bradley Garcia wrote. “And it is no basis on which to claim the favor of courts’ equitable judgment. While this court accords great weight and deference to invocations of national security and the safety of the President, such arguments are not an automatic get-out-of-law-free card.”

When the D.C. Circuit decided the case, the East Wing ballroom had been estimated to cost $400 million, supposedly funded through private donations. Studies showed those donors reliably receiving favorable government treatment — with suspicious timing, and the price tag for the construction ultimately ballooned to more than $900 million, mostly on the taxpayer’s dime, according to the Washington Post.

Despite lopsided defeats before federal judges, Trump has had a far better record before the Supreme Court in applying for emergency relief.

In a study released this past March, the Brennan Center found that the Trump administration prevailed roughly 80 percent of the time that it sought emergency relief. Those rulings typically do not state the reasoning for reversing lower court decisions, even on a temporary basis.

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Feds stonewall the SPLC

As an October trial rapidly approaches, the Southern Poverty Law Center has hit a stonewall in its effort to get prosecutors to disclose mountains of information about its historic cooperation with federal law enforcement.

That’s a key issue because the Trump Justice Department accuses the SPLC of defrauding donors by telling them that they are fighting hate groups, when they paid certain extremists to become informants.

The SPLC notes that the now-shuttered informants program produced information that the historic civil rights group shared with law enforcement. In one instance, the SPLC revealed that informant-generated information disrupted a neo-Nazi’s plans for a terrorist attack on a Las Vegas synagogue and gay bar.

The Trump Justice Department is now arguing that it doesn’t need to disclose the information because the SPLC already has it.

“There is no requirement that the government seek out evidence already available to the SPLC,” prosecutors wrote.

In the same motion, the SPLC admits that the FBI could have mountains of evidence showing the group’s longtime cooperation with federal law enforcement.

On Thursday, prosecutors said that they asked the FBI to run the search terms “Southern Poverty Law Center” and “SPLC” on the bureau’s Sentinel database, leading to thousands of hits.

“The result was in excess of 65,000 positive hits in over 170 cases,” prosecutors reveal.

But they won’t let the SPLC have access to that evidence, claiming that it would be too onerous to sift through those hits for relevant information.

“Each occurrence will then need to be read to determine if the document appears to be relevant to the SPLC’s request. If a particular document appears to be relevant, the associated case file will need to be read to determine what information within the case file is relevant.”

The Supreme Court precedent of Brady v. Maryland requires the government to disclose favorable information to the defense.

The SPLC has asked U.S. District Judge Emily Marks, a Trump appointee, to order the government to comply with its requests.

Judge blocks Trump’s disaster relief funds scheme

Throughout his second term, Trump has held billions of federal tax dollars hostage from states to pressure them to advance his political agenda.

That trend inspired hundreds of federal lawsuits and scores of injunctions blocking Trump’s scheme to coerce states into supporting his immigration agenda, abandon sanctuary protections, or conform to his culture-war hobbyhorses.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Oregon blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to tie disaster relief for the city of Salem to rebuking so-called “gender ideology” and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Chief U.S. District Judge Michael McShane recognized that such a policy was the definition of arbitrary and capricious.

“One of the key roles of the federal government is to provide communities with the tools to recover from and to mitigate natural disasters,” McShane wrote in the introduction of his ruling. “Yet, as wildfires, severe storms, and floods routinely ravage through the State of Oregon, disaster relief has become a tool to advance unrelated executive policy. Although it is hard to imagine the connection between the use of preferred pronouns and the fires currently burning through central Oregon, Defendants (United States agencies and their senior officials) have announced new conditions for federal disaster-related funding. Specifically, they seek to prohibit the promotion of ‘gender ideology,’ diversity, equity, inclusion, and more.”

It is the worst year for wildfires that the state of Oregon has experienced on record, and the city of Salem faced a different natural disaster late last year in the form of a winter storm that damaged a wastewater treatment plant.

Salem authorities sought more than $1 million in federal money to repair the plant and guarantee residents could continue to drink safe and clean drinking water.

When that money came with the Trump Department of Homeland Security’s “standard” terms including its anti-transgender and anti-DEI crusade, Salem sued in federal court — and won.

“Nowhere in the briefings, the regulations, or the executive orders does the government attempt to define ‘gender ideology’ or DEI in any helpful way,” the judge noted in a footnote.

During Biden’s term, there was a manufactured controversy based on false claims that federal disaster relief programs slowed aid to hurricane-hit areas in Florida that voted for Trump. The Federal Emergency Management Agency investigated those allegations thoroughly and found “no evidence” to support them, but that misinformation campaign generated outrage based on the understanding that disaster relief shouldn’t be politicized.

Now, Trump is openly playing politics with relief money in a state facing natural disasters on an unprecedented scale — and routinely holding up federal taxpayer money for nakedly partisan ends until judges force him to release the money. Trump’s latest defeat in Oregon marks only the latest in a series.

The documentary by BBC’s “Panorama” — Trump: A Second Chance? — never aired in the United States, but Trump sued the British broadcaster in Florida anyway over an edit of his speech at the Capitol Ellipse that clipped two of his most inflammatory remarks together. The BBC’s subsequent apology over the cut didn’t avert litigation.

Earlier this week, the case was reassigned to U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Kuntz, who was recently confirmed in a party-line vote after refusing to admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. But it gets worse than that: As a Florida state appellate judge, Kuntz presided over another outlandish Trump defamation case against the Pulitzer Prize Board — and sought a federal nomination while presiding over the case. Kuntz ultimately wrote the opinion advancing the case, and he got the sought-after nomination. The Freedom of the Press Foundation, aghast by what they described as a conflict of interest, filed a complaint against him.

During a Substack Live conversation, Michael Popok and I discussed what this means for Trump v. BBC and for the nation’s reputation for press freedom protections in the land of the First Amendment.

Dive deeper into the topic by watching my breakdown on here.

In the video at the top of this newsletter, Popok and I also discussed rapid developments in ABC’s new lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission’s attack dog Brendan Carr and more.

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Trump’s growing pile of defeats speak for themselves: Courts have stopped his plans for military occupations of U.S. cities, always the ones that didn’t vote for him. His so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs have been found illegal, and his birthright citizenship ban was ruled unconstitutional. His former election lawyer Harmeet Dhillon is 0-22 (so far) in her effort to grab sensitive voter-roll information from states across the country and Washington, D.C. Nationwide protests forced his administration to abandon an archipelago of immigration warehouses. Universities, law firms, and media companies that have chosen pushback over capitulation have won.

So, I argued, observing Trump’s losing record isn’t an exercise in optimism. It’s realism. Norm Eisen replied by invoking the late, legendary playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel’s words to him.

“Havel used to think I was too optimistic,” he reflected. “And he used to say, ‘Norman, don't be optimistic, but you can be hopeful.’”

With that introduction, we launched into a wide-ranging conversation about Trump’s ambitions to skirt the law and Constitution to turn the nation’s capital into a self-glorifying “Versailles,” including in the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the court-blocked East Wing ballroom. We then moved on to Attorney General Todd Blanche’s failed effort to keep unqualified Trump loyalists in U.S. Attorney positions, despite their failure to achieve Senate confirmation — and ended with the “objectively bizarre” saga of Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp.

Watch the full video at the top of this newsletter.

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