Days after an eyebrow-raising appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor Jay Clayton received a nomination for the position of Director of National Intelligence.

When first eyed for the role of U.S. Attorney, Clayton’s predecessor Geoffrey Berman called him “an unqualified choice” because of his lack of experience as a federal prosecutor. Clayton appears to have slender qualifications for the top national security position in the United States, save for his brief stint heading the Southern District of New York (SDNY). The statute for the role requires that nominees “shall have extensive national security expertise,” but Clayton’s background is largely in civil financial enforcement. He previously served as director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but he has a qualification that Donald Trump prizes highly.

Throughout his brief tenure as SDNY U.S. Attorney, Clayton routinely provided pro-Trump commentary on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” where he recently cast doubt on California’s elections. Some of SDNY’s most respected veterans who served in that office called it a stunning departure from the office’s norms of independence.

Former federal prosecutor , who spent 17 years inside that office before serving as an elected district attorney, told All Rise News that Clayton’s TV punditry seemed to be an “audition” for Trump.

Another former SDNY prosecutor with decades of experience said in an interview that he never saw Clayton’s predecessors engage in politically charged TV commentary. A close-knit law enforcement community, SDNY alumni are typically reluctant to criticize their successors.

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The once-”Sovereign” district

The office of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan once burnished the reputation of the “Sovereign District of New York,” a jurisdiction that boasted about its independence from Washington, D.C.

It’s where ex-U.S. Attorney refused to answer the phone when Donald Trump called his office during his first term in 2017 — and his successor Berman initially refused to step down from his position during a standoff years later with then-Attorney General Bill Barr, who reportedly pressured him to end a politically sensitive multi-billion dollar money laundering case implicating the Turkish government.

In 2020, Berman refused to leave his position until Barr abandoned his plan to replace him with Clayton, and Barr relented, nominating Berman’s then-deputy Audrey Strauss as his successor. Trump immediately reverted to his plan to install Clayton in SDNY during his second term.

Unlike his predecessors, Clayton has brought few major cases inside the federal courthouse in Wall Street’s shadow. Prior SDNY U.S. Attorneys prosecuted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout, billionaire financiers and New York State’s top political leadership. (Ex-Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey, who prosecuted Epstein and Maxwell, was fired under Clayton’s watch, and two federal judges said that Clayton tried to unseal Epstein-related grand jury records as a “diversion” for public outrage about the scandal.) Clayton’s highest-profile case — against ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro — was first indicted by Berman.

But Clayton still managed to keep his name in the news despite a paucity of ambitious indictments through his CNBC appearances, where he’s denounced Trump’s criminal prosecutions and defended his $1.776 billion slush fund.

On Monday, Clayton told “Squawk Box” that the United States has “a deep problem with voting in America" during a roundtable about the recent California election.

“The American people are right to question it,” Clayton said, referring to election “integrity.”

Some SDNY stalwarts never saw anything like it before Clayton.

“Why go on these shows? What is he gaining from this? Who is he trying to please?” Rocah asked rhetorically during a video interview with All Rise News.

She added later: “His job is not to audition for Donald Trump.”

Former SDNY prosecutor Perry Carbone, who spent more than 30 years inside the Justice Department and worked with Clayton, said politically charged interviews are against the district’s traditions.

“When a U.S. Attorney does a public appearance, he should be appearing neutral and impartial, and not engaging in highly charged political discussions,” Carbone said.

Speaking as someone who “respects” Clayton, Carbone said that avoiding the partisan fray is important to protect the public perception of the office.

“The story here isn’t necessarily about one person,” Carbone said. “It should be the thousands of career employees, who work every day to uphold the rule of law, and they’re the ones who deserve public confidence that the institution remains independent and above politics.”

The SDNY U.S. Attorney’s office declined to comment.

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‘The dumbest conspiracy theory’

During Clayton’s roughly 9-minute segment, he touched the third rail of American politics: MAGA-borne election conspiracy theories, which he appeared to endorse.

Instead of echoing Trump’s 2020 election lies, Clayton validated right-wing distrust about the electoral defeat of longshot Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star turned Trump-endorsed conservative hopeful.

In a city where more than 60 percent of the voters are registered Democratic, and fewer than 15 percent are registered Republican, Trump-endorsed former reality TV star Spencer Pratt was projected to be the loser of the mayoral election that day, after nearly a week of grindingly slow ballot-counting. Although the final tally won’t be completed for weeks, Pratt appeared to have garnered an almost identical percentage of the votes that Trump did in the last cycle: 26 percent.

This reality has spawned, in the estimation of CNN’s data guru Harry Enten, the “dumbest conspiracy theory” he ever heard about elections.

Nithya Raman, the democratic-socialist candidate who defeated Pratt, outperformed him in the last Los Angeles Times poll before the race, and she is the favorite in the upcoming runoff elections against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. Enten pointed out that Bass would have much preferred having Pratt as her opponent, as she polls 18 points ahead of him.

Clayton didn’t cite any evidence of election fraud or irregularities during the segment, nor did he contradict a debunked conspiracy theory by CNBC host Joe Kernan that late-counting ballot drops had shifted 100 percent toward Democrats.

Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, dispelled that rumor on social media the prior day, writing: "There was a claim circulating on social media about an election night ballot update at the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters where one candidate received zero votes.”

“We reviewed official county records. The claim is false,” Essayli added. “Each candidate received votes in every update.”

A Trump appointee, Essayli was disqualified as U.S. Attorney because he was unable to secure Senate confirmation or the approval of the judges in his district, but he has continued to serve in the first assistant position.

Despite claiming that he was “not speculating about fraud,” Clayton baselessly suggested throughout the segment that California’s elections were untrustworthy and that there was an unacceptable “opportunity” to rig the race. He didn’t specify, or provide evidence for, that claim.

CNBC’s “Squawk Box” didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether the show would post a correction about the false and debunked claim.

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‘They tried to destroy him’

That segment was far from Clayton’s maiden voyage in MAGA punditry.

Earlier this year, Clayton defended Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund as fair compensation for the leak of his tax returns by the supposedly shadowy forces against him.

“Look, they leaked his tax returns, they tried to destroy him,” Clayton said. “Okay, we resolved that."

There was never a “they.”

In 2019, an Internal Revenue Service contractor named Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s records along with those of hundreds of thousands of other people to expose the tax avoidance schemes of the wealthy. Though the leak occurred during Trump’s first term, Littlejohn was prosecuted during the Biden administration and received a heavy 5-year sentence. Clayton did not explain why he believed the disclosure of Trump’s tax records, something most other presidents have done voluntarily, would have supposedly destroyed Trump.

Mimi Rocah called it “humorous” how Clayton’s boss, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, retreated from defending the fund days later.

“So Clayton put himself out there in a very vulnerable way, defending something that no one else was going to really defend, including Republican senators,” she said.

But Clayton’s implicit backing of the Jan. 6 rioters was deadly serious.

“The whole idea of the settlement is purportedly to right a wrong to these poor January 6th defendants who were supposedly wrongly prosecuted — when they were not,” she said.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has scheduled Clayton’s confirmation hearing for June 17 at 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

Unless confirmed in lightning speed, Clayton will take over for Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, who has no previous national security experience and routinely targeted Trump’s perceived enemies with unsupported mortgage fraud allegations as Federal Housing Finance Agency director. Pulte was expected to temporarily assume the job on June 19.

Look out for an extensive video interview with Mimi Rocah about Clayton and SDNY soon on ’s All Rise News playlist.

There are still other challenges pending, including a lawsuit heading to oral arguments on Friday in Alexandria, Va., in front of the only judge who has temporarily blocked it to date.

All Rise News will cover those proceedings inside federal court.

During a roughly half-hour preview, ’s and I discussed what issues are likely to come up in court. Prosecutors have argued that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s testimony that the government is “not moving forward” with the fund should make the litigation moot. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has accepted that argument so far, but his ruling reportedly came with a warning.

“Don’t play possum with me,” Leon told the Trump Justice Department, according to POLITICO.

Popok and I also discussed the questions Blanche likely will be asked during his confirmation, the proper way to grill him, and the election conspiracy theories floated by the top prosecutor in charge of the Southern District of New York.

Watch the video at the top of this newsletter.

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Three weeks of transcripts ordered released by a federal judge on Tuesday reveal the stunning exchanges between grand jurors and Trump Justice Department prosecutors pursuing an indictment of the “Broadview Six” before the high-profile protest case evaporated.

Federal prosecutors were forced to dismiss their case against six Chicago-based politicians and activists who protested outside an immigration facility in the Broadview neighborhood. The case collapsed last month days before an anticipated trial after a judge forced the government to reveal the transcripts.

U.S. District Judge April Perry initiated proceedings to determine whether the government should face sanctions for prosecutorial misconduct and potential ethical violations because of interactions with the grand jury that had previously been described but never seen publicly.

As summarized by a lawyer for one of the “Broadview Six” defendants, the transcripts reveal that the grand jury “repeatedly attempted to say ‘no’ to this sham political indictment.”

“The Department of Justice attorneys involved in this case refused to accept that reality or their Constitutional obligations, committing appalling misconduct and putting their DOJ marching orders above justice,” said attorney Christopher Parente, who represents Chicago politician and former defendant Brian Straw.

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‘Second time is the charm’

Hitting the public record in a rush of nearly 200 pages, the first tranche of transcripts — documenting proceedings from three weeks in October 2025 — revealed the grand jury’s unfiltered appraisal of the case after the panel rejected an indictment a week earlier.

“I heard this case like last week, and I thought it was a crock of shit then and I still think it is,” a grand juror said.

Prosecutors didn’t reveal the fact that the grand jury initially returned a “no true bill” on the indictment until Judge Perry forced the disclosure.

Then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenberg, then the lead federal prosecutor on the case, can be seen in the transcripts cajoling the grand jurors, culling out those who expressed doubts, and telling the panel to trust her judgment in order to obtain an indictment weeks later.

“I am back because if you did not — between the questions and not getting an indictment, I did not do my job. I did not explain it to you well enough,” she told the grand jury after the first indictment failed. “I didn’t explain the law to you. I know we were running out of time, and I knew it at the time, but I realize it’s on me. I did not do my job last week well enough for you.”

A grand juror appeared concerned that the government would keep pushing the case until it got the outcome it wanted.

“Do you have unlimited tries?” the grand juror asked.

“Do we have — what did you ask?” Mecklenberg responded.

“Unlimited tries,” the grand juror pressed. “Like you keep coming back as many times as you want?”

“Well, I don’t think we have to worry about that,” Mecklenberg replied. “I think we’re going to be just fine.”

Her then-fellow prosecutor Matthew Skiba chimed in: “I think the saying is the second time is the charm.”

Although it was once extraordinarily rare for prosecutors to fail to obtain an indictment, Trump’s second term has seen grand juries repeatedly rejecting charges, including in the cases of New York Attorney General Letitia James and immigration protester Sydney Reid, both of which were rejected three times by grand juries.

In certain cases, prosecutors charged misdemeanors in a criminal complaint to avoid having to face a grand jury. One grand juror asked Mecklenberg whether prosecutors could charge misdemeanors without them, and she replied that how the government proceeded wasn’t the jury’s concern.

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‘Vindictive political indictments’

Before the case’s dismissal, Judge Perry said that a prosecutor impermissibly “vouched” for the case, relying on her reputation rather than the evidence to supply probable cause.

Indeed, the transcript shows Merklenberg telling grand jurors that Skiba would “vouch” for her judgment.

“I said I want to go in front of the Thursday grand jury because I know you and I trust you and you know me and you trust me, and I would never ask you to charge somebody if I didn’t think there was probable cause and you know you’ve asked me before ‘Well, what about this person?’” she said in the transcript. “And I said ‘I don’t charge people unless I’m absolutely sure.’”

Along the way, Mecklenberg admitted to a “mia culpa” [sic] of ex parte communications with two grand jurors outside of the jury room.

“So I need to put it on the record,” she noted.

In May, Judge Perry noted that prosecutors initially redacted this and other potential misconduct from the transcripts that the government provided to her.

Mecklenberg ultimately withdrew from the case to accept a job with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Il.) as counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and she was fired from the job after accusations of grand jury misconduct surfaced in the “Broadview Six” case.

The blast radius of the “Broadview Six” case could reverberate far beyond the prosecutors involved in the case. Other defendants targeted by the Trump Justice Department — including journalist Don Lemon and the Southern Poverty Law Center — have cited the case to argue that typically secret grand jury proceedings require scrutiny in the Trump 2.0 era.

A “Broadview Six” attorney endorsed that view.

“More disturbing, these transcripts demonstrate Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's public claims that the vindictive political indictments secured by his DOJ are meritorious because they come from grand juries are disingenuous at best, given the gross misconduct detailed here,” Parente said. “This DOJ has violated the good faith foundation of the grand jury process to weaponize indictments and subvert the law."

Read the transcripts here, here and here.

Is Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund to enrich his political allies and Jan. 6 insurrectionists alive or dead?

Call it Schrödinger’s slush fund: Trump’s former criminal defense attorney turned Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche pronounced it dead last week before Congress, but several lawsuits opposing it remain active.

Two of those cases will head to oral arguments this week, likely clarifying whether the federal judiciary has the power to bury it.

On Tuesday, the anti-corruption watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) will ask U.S. District Judge Richard Leon to block the fund on the grounds that it was “purpose-built” to avoid public scrutiny, authorizing only the release of “confidential” reports to Blanche.

On Friday, another lawsuit led by former Jan. 6 prosecutor Andrew Floyd will ask U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema to block it on First Amendment grounds, noting that the fund’s legal documents define “weaponization” as “the sustained use of the levers of government power by Democrat elected officials, political and career federal employees, contractors, and agents.”

The Trump Justice Department wants to swat away these lawsuits by noting that Blanche told Congress “we are not moving forward with the fund,” rendering the issue “moot.”

Brinkema previously issued an administrative stay forbidding the creation of the fund or distribution of any claims, but it remains to be seen whether any of the lawsuits will survive in light of Trump and Blanche’s retreat.

Regardless of whether any of the lawsuits seeking to block the fund will survive, Trump and his government attorneys will likely face a reckoning on whether the concept itself represented a fraud on the court.

In Florida, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams launched an inquiry into whether to sanction any party “responsible” for Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service that he controls. Trump sought $10 billion in damages over the leak of his tax records in 2019 by an IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn. There was never any credible theory about how Littlejohn’s leak could have damaged Trump to the tune of billions of dollars, and the statute of limitations on any claim had lapsed. Williams ordered Trump, the IRS and the Justice Department representing them both to answer allegations that the lawsuit was “collusive from the start” and an attempt to make the court a “victim of fraud.”

One of the 35 now-retired federal judges who urged Williams to open this inquiry told All Rise News that she was “unbelievably gratified” that the court is taking action.

“I certainly was of the generation that believed if something smelled bad, there had to be a cause of action,” former U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner said in a video interview. “There had to be something one could do about it, and this slush fun smelled bad.”

She said that the extraordinary rebuke of Trump and Blanche could have been much larger because the former judges had to organize it within a week.

“There were people who were calling us after the papers had been filed to see if they could join — judges calling us to see if they could join,” Gertner said. “So there was a clarity to this issue that was extraordinary.”

Watch the interview in full below.

Even if Blanche truly abandons the fund, the Trump Justice Department would still be able to enter into confidential settlements with Jan. 6 rioters who file claims.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a thought experiment involving a cat in a sealed box and a radioactive atom with a 50 percent chance of a deadly breakdown. Until the box is opened, Schrödinger says, quantum theory holds that the cat must be treated as simultaneously alive and dead.

So it is with Schrödinger’s slush fund: The Trump Justice Department claims in court that “no money had been transferred to the Fund. No mechanisms were in place for formally submitting, receiving, processing, granting, or denying claims. None of the five contemplated ‘Members’ who would establish and administer such procedures for the Fund had even been appointed.”

That may be true, but under the legal documents creating the fund, no member of the public could contradict the government if it were otherwise.

There’s another reason to suspect the fund isn’t dead: As his recent “Meet the Press” interview showed, Trump keeps treating it as though it can resurrect at any time.

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‘Designed to compensate the insurrectionists’

In a recent legal brief, Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) told a federal judge that Trump’s slush fund is “designed to compensate the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.”

“They write not as partisans but as representatives of the taxpayers whose funds have been committed to this scheme without statutory authorization, and as legislators who retain a direct constitutional stake in ensuring that the Executive Branch does not convert the public monies into an instrument of political reward,” their attorneys wrote last week in an amicus brief.

This simple observation seems to be oddly taboo: that Trump designed the fund explicitly to reward those who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to keep him in power.

Consider Trump’s contentious interview with NBC News host Kristen Welker on “Meet The Press” on Sunday. Welker calmly and insistently reminded Trump that he had no evidence for his conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election and the recent primary race in California. Trump insulted her as “corrupt” and called her “darling,” as he threw his mic on the ground and stormed off the set.

Even as she offered a masterclass of cool professionalism, Welker’s questioning contained a tacit assumption that financially rewarding violent rioters may have been some kind of mistake.

“Do you think anyone who attacked police officers on January 6th should get taxpayer money?” Welker asked Trump.

By the time of the interview, there could no longer have been any doubt that the fund was designed to benefit the rioters. On May 19, Blanche testified that the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, or “anybody” else who assaulted Capitol police with bear spray, pepper spray, Tasers, police batons, or other weapons could apply for compensation. Blanche has complete control over the fund’s operations and eligibility. If Trump or Blanche didn’t intend to reward violent rioters, they could have revised the fund to forbid payment to them, but they deliberately chose not to do so.

Trump used the opening to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 to cast “crooked cops” as the aggressors. He argued that the 172 rioters who pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement were pressured to do so, even though their assaults were caught on camera, and he bizarrely seemed to blame the entire melee on James Comey, who was no longer FBI director at the time.

There isn’t a singularly effective way of questioning Trump in a sit-down interview. He lies. He deflects. He insults. He stonewalls. He filibusters. He launches into conspiracy theories, and if he doesn’t like the questions, he attacks the journalist and news network hosting him, before pulling off the mic and walking off camera. And, most importantly for Trump, he disseminates his talking points and erodes trust in a free press before he leaves, which is why he always returns to the “fake news” he purports to despise.

Welker performed the ritual with as much skill and rigor as the format allows, pressing him on the evidence, providing the facts, and keeping a level head. It’s notable, however, that even in an interview as tough as Welker’s embeds a favorable assumption for Trump in the premise of the question, which entertains the possibility that rewarding violent insurrectionists isn’t Trump’s demonstrated goal.

That explanation may be too hot for Sunday morning TV, but it isn’t for two bipartisan senators addressing a federal judge.

“To deliberately deploy public funds, in violation of the Constitution and the laws of this nation, to compensate these perpetrators is to use the machinery of democratic government to subsidize an attack on that government’s most fundamental processes,” their brief states. “Congress itself, as both victim and the federal government’s sole appropriating authority, has a compelling institutional interest in ensuring that no public fund is converted into a reward for those who laid siege to it. A scheme deliberately designed to recast insurrectionists—including those who perpetrated violence against law enforcement officers—as victims and legitimate prosecutions as persecution does not merely rewrite history; it creates incentives for similar conduct in the future, with the explicit encouragement of the officials responsible for administering justice.”

All Rise News intends to cover the hearing in this case in federal court on Friday in Alexandria, Va.

Read the senators’ brief in full here.

That’s not an exaggeration, though it is, for now, just a thought experiment.

, the host of Lincoln Square’s “It’s the Democracy, Stupid” and former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, and I discussed the latest jarring headline this afternoon during a 45-minute live-streamed conversation that circled around a theme: How are the rule of law antibodies standing up to the authoritarian contagion gripping the United States?

Along the way, we discussed the cases of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, former Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, ex-FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the “Broadview Six.” We assessed Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s odds of receiving the Senate’s permanent stamp of approval in light of his record in office and explained why the Supreme Court’s restoration of racially discriminatory congressional maps in Alabama stunned even some of the most cynical observers.

Toward the end of the conversation, we returned to the breaking news: Lady Liberty’s hypothetical razing.

In seeking to overturn an order blocking the construction of the East Wing ballroom, Justice Department attorney Yaakov Roth laid out a sweeping vision of unchecked executive power during oral arguments.

U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett, a Barack Obama appointee, questioned the position that courts are powerless to act when the government tries to “move fast and break things.”

“If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty—the people whose ancestors that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast—nothing can be done?” Millett asked.

“I think that— I think that’s right, yes,” Roth replied.

(Listen to the exchange in full at minute 23:13 of the video linked here.)

It’s important to note: Federal judges often test the consequences of a litigant’s position with an extreme hypothetical, and there is a famous example involving Donald Trump: the immunity decision.

In arguing for sweeping presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, Trump’s then-defense attorney John Sauer was asked whether a sitting president could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival without fearing prosecution. Sauer answered yes, and the Supreme Court majority effectively endorsed that position in Trump v. United States.

The majority simply played down the likelihood that a president would use the power that the court handed the executive as an “extreme hypothetical.”

In that sense, oral arguments in the East Wing construction case this morning had an uncanny ring of the familiar.

Watch the video at the top of this newsletter for more analysis.

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Three of the formerly top “60 Minutes” correspondents have made the same unsettling claim about CBS News leadership: They have told journalists to insert false and biased statements in their reporting.

On the eve of his firing on Wednesday, Scott Pelley released a statement claiming: “For my part, management has instructed me to insert falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refused them.”

His erstwhile colleague Cecilia Vega said late last month: “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.”

Sharyn Alfonsi, the other ousted correspondent making this claim, put it more diplomatically that CBS leadership tried to “sanitize factually accurate reporting.”

Collectively, they bring roughly a century of experience and credibility in hard news-gathering, but the public doesn’t need to take their word for it.

When CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss made the last-minute decision to hold a “60 Minutes” segment on the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, the memo documenting the reasons for that decision showed a real-time demand to insert falsehoods and bias. In the memo, Weiss mischaracterized the Trump Justice Department’s legal rationale for targeting immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act.

“The admin has argued in court that detainees are entitled to ‘judicial review’ — and we should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority,” she wrote.

Weiss had it exactly backwards: The Trump Justice Department argued that no judicial review was available under the Alien Enemies Act, attempting to strip hundreds of men spirited out of the United States without due process of an opportunity to fight its illegal actions in court.

The both-sides presentation that Weiss advocated was a misleading pantomime of fairness. The Supreme Court already settled the issue, rejecting the federal government’s position by a 9-0 margin. Weiss instructed “60 Minutes” correspondents to replace accurate reporting with Trump-friendly spin. That isn’t a “She said, they said.” It’s a matter of public record.

Most charitably, Weiss may have been deceived by the false spin she demanded to insert into the broadcast, but the view from inside the network is more damning.

During the clash that got him fired, Pelley said that CBS owner David Ellison sent Weiss to “murder” a program that Trump hates, even if it’s the most profitable, respected, and highest rated newsmagazine on television. Three highly respected, and now ousted, correspondents indicate that CBS management’s attempts to skew and censor the news have been systematic, and Pelley said that Weiss lied to her staff as recently as today.

In a morning editorial call, Weiss reportedly told “60 Minutes” staff that the network tried to “find a way back” with Pelley, but he “chose” a different path. In Pelley’s account of the meeting, the network’s president Tom Cibrowski raised the prospect of “firing” him during the first 15 seconds. The executives were “abrupt, dismissive and uninterested in dialogue.”

“I am pained that the staff of CBS News was misled in the Wednesday morning conference call,” Pelley said. “These executives cannot gain the trust of staff with lies. This is antithetical to everything we stand for and reveals contempt for what journalists do.”

There is room for hope: The pro-Trump spin that Weiss wanted to run on the Alien Enemies Act never aired in the final “60 Minutes” segment on CECOT, suggesting that staff pushed back successfully. I agree with some of the network’s defenders that CBS News continues to produce tough reporting by journalists with integrity every day.

That so many of the network’s stalwarts are sounding the alarm for maximum impact shows an attempt to defend what they built: How many purges can take place before the next management-endorsed lie actually airs?

The CECOT saga relates to the first item on tonight’s legal roundup: a new wrinkle in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

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DHS Secretary Mullin’s misstep?

During Tuesday’s Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that he would be “happy” to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica.

The problem with that statement was that the Trump administration has spent months telling a federal judge that Costa Rica would have been an unacceptable destination, demanding permission to send Abrego to Liberia instead.

Abrego’s legal term flagged the disconnect to a federal judge on Wednesday.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., laid the trap for Mullin in an exchange, setting up his questioning with historical background.

“I’d like you to look into this because essentially what the administration did was say to him when he was returned to the United States after being wrongfully deported to El Salvador, and the administration admitted it wrongfully deported him, after he was returned, they leveled new criminal charges against him,” Van Hollen noted. “And they said to him, if you plead guilty to these criminal charges, we’ll send you to Costa Rica, and if you don’t, we’ll send you to Liberia. Well, he said I’m not going to plead guilty to these charges, and it turns out, just a short time ago, a federal judge determined that the administration had engaged in a vindictive prosecution against him. And so my question now is, will you, the administration, agree to have him removed to Costa Rica rather than engaging in punishing him for pursuing his constitutional rights?”

At first, Mullin deflected the question, but Van Hollen caught Mullin off-guard when he noted that Costa Rica agreed to accept Abrego.

“Great,” replied Mullin, “if he’s willing to do that, we’ll be happy to send him.”

Abrego’s attorneys flagged the exchange in a filing to U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who is deciding whether the government’s quest to send Abrego to Liberia is vindictive.

Read that filing here.

SPLC: Take two?

The Trump Justice Department obtained a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday.

By Wednesday, the maneuver may already be backfiring, and the SPLC wants a judge to investigate whether to sanction prosecutors because of the manner in which they rolled out the new indictment.

The superseding indictment — which, as the name suggests, replaces the original — contains no new charges or defendants, but it’s roughly seven pages longer than the original, rattling off unproven allegations in thicker detail for public consumption.

The SPLC’s attorneys argue that prosecutors proved that was the point by sending a draft of the new document to the press before it was publicly filed and docketed. The storied civil rights group argues that this violates grand jury secrecy, raising the question about whether the government should face sanctions.

“In decades of collective practice, including serving as prosecutors at DOJ, none of the SPLC’s counsel has ever seen anything remotely like what DOJ did last night—distributing what turned out not to be the actual superseding indictment returned by the grand jury and docketed today, but one that has no indication of its finality, in native Word that could be edited and reposted, and before the actual returned charges were unsealed, to a group of journalists,” the SPLC’s attorney Abbe Lowell wrote. “This conduct violates the letter and spirit of the federal rules, DOJ’s own policies, and even common-sense notions of professionalism to abide by the normal court procedure and treat those accused of wrongdoing fairly.”

A federal magistrate recently reminded prosecutors of their obligations to protect SPLC’s right to a fair trial after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was forced to correct a false statement that he made to Fox’s Laura Ingraham.

“We must rediscover the old values of our profession,” U.S. Magistrate Kelly Fitzgerald Pate wrote at the time.

The SPLC says that the government “seems not to have taken this admonition to heart.”

The judge set the SPLC’s arraignment on the superseding indictment for June 16.

Read its filing here.

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In other news — and a suggested read

On Tuesday, an intermediate appellate court in New York upheld a $4.3 million judgment against Wayne LaPierre that barred the former National Rifle Association chief from holding any role as an officer or director of the group for a decade.

• It reinforced a key victory by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who filed the case accusing the NRA leadership of unlawfully mismanaging millions of donor dollars.

• “Wayne LaPierre and other senior NRA leaders broke the law by funneling millions of dollars in lavish perks to themselves and their families,” James said in a statement. “After we successfully proved our case to a jury, LaPierre was ordered to pay $4.3 million and was barred from serving as an NRA officer or director for a decade. This decision upholds the jury’s verdict and is another victory in our efforts to ensure that LaPierre is held accountable for his illegal self-dealing.”

• The Trump Justice Department sought to prosecute James for suing the NRA, characterizing the successful case as a violation of the gun group’s civil rights. But a federal judge found that the ex-Trump lawyer turned first-time prosecutor behind the probe, John Sarcone, was unlawfully appointed.

During primary elections on Tuesday, the Supreme Court reinstated gerrymandered maps in Alabama repeatedly found to have been intentionally racially discriminatory.

• The maps erase one of the state’s two Black opportunity districts.

• The Supreme Court previously affirmed an Alabama court’s findings of racial discrimination, but the 6-3 conservative supermajority signed off on the maps this time.

• When gutting the vestiges of the Voting Rights Act in the Callais decision, Justice Samuel Alito claimed that he had only updated the test for finding racial discrimination in redistricting. In the wake of the latest ruling, some legal observers said that the Roberts Court removed the fig leaf, revealing that the landmark civil rights law is truly dead.

Here’s how a recent CNN editorial puts it:

“The high court’s action demonstrated the truth that the nation’s protections for voting rights have not merely been “updated,” as Justice Samuel Alito insisted in late April.

They have been jettisoned.”

In its wake, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that her conservative colleagues have left electoral chaos in Alabama.

“Weeks ago, I warned that vacating the District Court’s injunction in these cases would ‘unleash chaos and . . . confuse voters.’ … Nevertheless, the Court forged ahead. Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought. Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos. Because I choose to defend the rule of law and the right of all Alabamians to participate equally in democracy, I respectfully dissent.”

Here is the full ruling and dissent.

Finally, in case you missed it, a Wisconsin-based federal judge vigorously questioned the legal basis behind the conviction of former Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan on Wednesday morning.

Catch up on the live coverage made possible by All Rise News subscribers here.

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MILWAUKEE, Wisc. — A federal judge on Wednesday sharply questioned the basis of the conviction of former Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan, repeatedly pressing the government about the theory of the case in light of new precedent.

During roughly 45 minutes of oral argument, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman did little to reveal how he would rule, but he grappled with a core issue underlying the guilty verdict.

An ‘invalid theory’

Late last year, a jury delivered a surprising mixed verdict in Dugan’s case.

Despite acquitting Dugan of a misdemeanor count of concealing an undocumented immigrant from federal agents, the jury convicted her of a felony count of obstructing a pending proceeding — namely, the immigrant’s arrest. The substance of the charges were similar, and most of the facts of the case were undisputed.

Prosecutors accused then-Judge Dugan of trying to prevent immigration authorities from arresting Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a criminal defendant who had been facing domestic violence charges in her courtroom in April 2025.

Federal agents did not have a judicial warrant for Flores-Ruiz’s arrest, only an administrative warrant internal to the agency.

Dugan’s attorney Steven Biskupic noted that the government’s case hinged upon blurring the distinction: “They said that the type of warrant did not matter.”

Since Dugan’s conviction, the Fourth Circuit disagreed with that legal position in U.S. v. Hernandez, a case reversing the obstruction conviction of an immigrant who escaped from his own arrest. The court found that the existence of an ICE warrant did not create a “proceeding” within the meaning of the statute.

Biskupic said that the development means that “the only appellate court in the country to address the issue” found that the government’s case hinges upon “an invalid theory.”

If one accepts the government’s argument, Biskupic said: “Then, everything ICE does is a proceeding and subject to a felony five years.”

‘A really long operation’

When questioning the government, Judge Adelman kept returning to a theme: the breadth of the government’s definition of a “proceeding.”

“Wouldn’t you agree that the way you’re defining ‘proceeding’ is a really long operation?” Adelman asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Frohling.

Shortly into oral arguments, Adelman drew an analogy about how to describe the proceedings taking place in his courthouse.

“Are we 10 minutes into it or a couple of years into it?” he asked.

Frohling noted that it’s been a little more than a year since Dugan’s arrest in April 2025, but he reiterated the government’s view that a proceeding might not be time-limited.

Judge Adelman pressed, “A proceeding could be a couple of years?”

The prosecutor replied, “It could be a couple of minutes. It could be a couple of years. It depends on the context.”

Judge Adelman is not bound by the Fourth Circuit’s precedent, and prosecutors called the Hernandez case an “outlier.” The government, however, previously cited the lower court’s decision in the same case when it supported their position.

“It wasn’t an outlier when [prosecutors] thought it [supported] their theory,” Biskupic noted.

Wisconsin falls within the Seventh Circuit’s jurisdiction, where an existing precedent in the Senffner case states that “proceeding” should be defined “rather broadly.” But that case did not squarely address immigration arrests.

Biskupic said of Senffner: “It’s not as broad as the law enforcement exception.”

A reversal of Dugan’s conviction could deliver a major blow to the Trump Justice Department, voiding one of its rare victories in a high-profile case — and removing an arrow from the quiver of federal prosecutors targeting judges who seek to keep their courthouses safe from immigration enforcement.

During Dugan’s trial, a jury heard evidence about how Donald Trump’s controversial policy sparked anger, fear and confusion in the Milwaukee County Circuit Court System. The chief judge of the circuit opposed the policy as chilling access to justice for crime victims who happen to be immigrants.

All Rise News covered Dugan’s trial from in its entirety late last year: Catch up on reporting of closing arguments and the verdict here.

Donald Trump could see the writing on the wall.

One federal judge temporarily blocked the operation of his $1.776 billion slush fund until one of several challenges can be fully litigated. Several lawsuits had been filed against the fund from coast to coast, attacking its legal underpinnings from various constitutional and statutory angles, including the 14th Amendment’s prohibition against funding insurrectionists.

On Friday, one federal judge opened an inquiry into whether she should sanction government lawyers for perpetrating a “fraud on the court.” Absent Trump’s anticipated surrender, it remains unclear whether Congress or the judiciary will kill it first.

Ultimately, Trump appears to be deciding to drop plans for the fund on his own, but early reports have been silent on his attempt to prevent the Internal Revenue Service from auditing him or his family, potentially sparing them from paying more than $100 million in back taxes and penalties.

As with the fund itself, attorneys Norm Eisen and Matthew Platkin reminded the public to read the fine print.

“We continue to await formal confirmation, and the devil is always in the details,” they wrote in a statement on behalf of Democracy Defenders Action.

Recently, Eisen and Platkin co-wrote a legal brief on behalf of 35 former federal judges asking the court to reopen Trump v. IRS, the lawsuit upon which the purported settlement was based. In an early success for that effort, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams ordered the government to answer whether the lawsuit was a product of “deception,” “fraud” and “collusion” between Trump and the federal agencies that he controls.

Unprompted, Judge Williams raised the prospect of issuing Rule 11 sanctions against the “responsible party.”

“We hope the court will continue its inquiry,” Eisen and Platkin wrote.

Former U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who was part of the 35-jurist coalition seeking the inquiry, celebrated their early success.

“The lawyers who are carrying Trump’s water in these cases have to understand that there will be a post-Trump era of reckoning,” Judge Gertner told All Rise News. “They will have to face their peers. There will be a time of reckoning when the representations [they] made in court, and the specious arguments that [they] made will be accounted for.”

For a full analysis of Trump’s retreat, watch my conversation with former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann from earlier today, and look out for another interview with Judge Gertner on Legal AF.

In the rest of tonight’s legal roundup, Pride Month kicks off with a decisive legal victory for transgender armed service members, and the Trump Justice Department is let off with a warning over its extrajudicial sliming of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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‘Arbitrary and based upon animus’

A federal appeals court protected the rights of 28 transgender troops, finding by a 2-1 majority that their combined 180 years of military service were unlawfully cut short because of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “arbitrary” decision.

Hegseth based his directive on Trump’s executive order slurring transgender troops as unable to meet the “rigorous standards necessary for military service.”

Led by transgender Army Lt. Nic Talbott, the plaintiffs collectively earned more than 80 commendations for honorable service, only to be denigrated by a president who received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, four for education and a medical exemption for “bone spurs” in his heels.

“In sum, the Commander-in-Chief declared transgender people as categorically unfit for military service explicitly because of their gender identity,” U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote in the lead opinion. “To add insult, the President labeled transgender persons as dishonorable, undisciplined, arrogant, selfish liars.”

Trump Justice Department attorneys didn’t attempt to defend those characterizations in court. Instead, the government argued that the military had the authority to disqualify people from service based on gender dysphoria, a mental health condition associated with the psychological distress resulting from a misalignment between gender identity and sex assigned at birth. The condition is not synonymous with transgender identity itself.

Judge Wilkins said the court could not ignore the “animus” underlying the supposed medical disqualification by sticking “its head in the sand, like the proverbial ostrich.”

“If we are at the point where invidious reasons that were expressly given for a classification can be completely ignored and replaced with our imagined non-invidious reasons, then equal protection jurisprudence has truly become bankrupt,” Wilkins wrote in the lead opinion.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling reining in nationwide injunctions in Trump v. CASA, the immediate ruling only applies to the plaintiffs whose military service was terminated under the transgender service ban. Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Judith Rogers, a Clinton appointee, would have extended the decision to transgender plaintiffs who wished to join the military.

U.S. Circuit Judge Justin Walker, a Trump appointee, dissented and would have upheld the ban.

The New York Times reports that the plaintiffs are expected to seek to extend the ruling to all transgender troops.

Read the ruling in full here.

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‘The old values of our profession’

Trump’s Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche avoided a court order compelling the Justice Department to avoid prejudicing the pretrial rights of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But a federal magistrate judge made clear on Monday that Blanche may be skating on thin ice.

After the SPLC’s indictment, Blanche went on a media tour attacking the storied civil rights group. He told Fox’s Laura Ingraham that there’s “no allegation or information” that the SPLC shared information gathered by its informants program with law enforcement, only to retreat from that position with Shannon Bream, the host of the network’s Sunday show.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kelly Fitzgerald Pate said that the SPLC effectively received the retraction that it wanted.

“The public record made by the Acting Attorney General now reflects the substance of the relief SPLC requested: a correction as to its sharing of informant information with law enforcement,” Pate wrote. “The Court need not wade into a comparison of each program’s ratings and reach or every social media circulation of either clip to find that the substance of the request for relief is now moot.”

SPLC sought an order barring the government from making “further false or misleading statements.” Prosecutors said they were “well aware of [their] obligations under the law and applicable rules” and committed to “act accordingly.”

For Pate, that was enough, but she ended her ruling with a pointed conclusion.

“More fundamentally, ‘[w]e must return to the original principle that, as officers of the court, attorneys are servants of the law rather than servants of the highest bidder. We must rediscover the old values of our profession. The integrity of our justice system depends on it,’” the ruling states. “Like any officer of the court, the prosecutors are bound by their statements to this Court. On this record, the Court finds no further relief is warranted at this time.”

Read the full five-page order here.

One final note

This week, All Rise News is heading out to Milwaukee to cover oral arguments seeking to reverse the conviction of now-former Judge Hannah Dugan, a high-stakes hearing for judicial independence that could erase one of the Trump Justice Department’s rare victories in a high-profile case. It’s extremely uncommon for defendants to overturn a conviction through a post-trial motion for an acquittal, but a recent change in the legal landscape appears to be highly favorable to Dugan. Find out more by clicking here.

All Rise News subscribers make live trial coverage like this possible. If you aren’t a subscriber already, consider becoming one below.

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As first reported by Axios, a senior administration official said that the fund is “dead for now,” and another source said that the “plan” is to “halt” it. “But the president likes the fund, he believes in it,” one of the sources told the outlet. “So nothing is final until it's final.”

The Trump Justice Department later confirmed the reporting on the record, misleadingly claiming that they were complying with a court order. But the truth was that no court permanently blocked the fund’s operation. There was only a temporary restraining order preserving the status quo until one of the legal challenges could be litigated, and Trump appears to be spinning retreat as compliance, as he faces a growing number of rebukes from judges, Congress, and the public.

During a roughly 40-minute conversation on Substack Live, former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann and I noted that shelving the fund likely won’t dull the Trump administration’s legal headaches. Congressional lawmakers are considering legislation to permanently block the fund, and a federal judge has opened an inquiry to consider whether to sanction the government lawyers behind Trump v. Internal Revenue Service for abusing the legal process.

Find out why in the full video at the top of this newsletter.

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U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said that her order would “ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed” until a lawsuit filed by Democracy Forward on behalf of former Jan. 6 prosecutor Andrew Floyd and others is fully adjudicated. Floyd led a task force investigating and prosecuting rioters who assaulted law enforcement.

In a footnote to her order, Brinkema said that a restraining order was necessary because the government refused to refrain from doling out money before the litigation had concluded.

“It is important that the status quo be maintained until plaintiffs’ pending motion has been resolved, especially as plaintiffs allege in their expedited motion that defense counsel ‘was unable ... to provide assurances of how long [the] status quo would last’ and declined plaintiffs’ ‘request that the government commit to not transferring money to the Fund or processing or paying claims until at least June 19 to allow for less compressed briefing in this case,’” the footnote said.

During a 50-minute Substack Live, ’s Michael noted lawyers for the plaintiff set a “trap” for the federal government to be hoisted by the petard of its own intransigence.

Our Friday week-in-review touched upon the numerous challenges filed against the $1.776 billion fund by , , and the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Plus, Congress appears increasingly unlikely to put its seal of approval on Trump’s slush fund. We also discussed former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee, the bar complaint against her successor Todd Blanche, and the many defeats and setbacks in their cases: including the Broadview Six and Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Those losses could easily snowball in light of recent motions filed by journalist Don Lemon and former Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan. Read Judge Brinkema’s ruling here, and watch the full conversation at the top of this newsletter.

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On Tuesday, the SPLC put a new precedent at the center of its request — the dismissal of the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Allison Gill and I explained in a Substack Live conversation on Wednesday that the Abrego precedent’s appearance 23 times in the SPLC’s motion is no accident. Both cases feature a familiar cast of characters and developments.

In both cases, now-Acting U.S. Attorney Todd Blanche made potentially prejudicial remarks about the defendant on national TV that could damage the government’s case. Blanche’s aide Aakash Singh played a key role in carrying out his boss’s objectives, and a line-up of high-ranking Trump administration officials engaged in a pre-trial media blitz against the defendant.

In Abrego’s case, the then-Chief of the Criminal Division for the Middle District of Tennessee resigned on the day of the sealed indictment.

In the SPLC’s case, Justice Department whistleblowers reportedly told congressional Democrats that Blanche rushed the case before any investigation could be completed.

“Before the grand jury returned the indictment, the prosecutors did not interview any current employees of the organization nor make any request of the SPLC’s counsel for any voluntary interviews of employees,” the civil rights group revealed in its motion. “They had already determined to seek an indictment without ever reaching out to counsel for the SPLC.”

In a roughly 40-minute conversation, Allison Gill and I dive deep into the motion, its footnotes, and the new reality of Trump 2.0, in which formerly longshot motions face increasing odds of success with growing piles of evidence at their side.

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Late last year, All Rise News provided wall-to-wall coverage of Dugan’s trial.

All Rise News subscribers made that in-depth coverage possible.

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A federal judge postponed the sentencing of now-former Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan and set the stage for oral arguments on her motion for a judgment of acquittal or a new trial.

Typically, such post-trial motions are extremely difficult to win because federal judges are reluctant to disturb a jury’s verdict in a criminal case.

In a Substack Live, former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman and I explain why the legal landscape has changed, and a federal judge appears to be taking Dugan’s latest motion seriously.

The critical jury instructions

First, here’s a refresher on a case that could have substantial ramifications for the Trump administration’s attacks on the judiciary.

In April 2025, then-Judge Dugan was arrested on charges of concealing an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, from federal authorities and obstructing his arrest. The jury’s mixed verdict surprised many legal observers: The panel cleared Dugan of the misdemeanor concealment charge and convicted her of felony obstruction.

As jurors later clarified in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the seeming disconnect came down to U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman’s instructions. There was no direct evidence that Dugan knew specifically that ICE agents had come to arrest Flores-Ruiz, and jurors asked the judge for guidance about whether Dugan needed to know the identity of the individual ICE wanted to arrest.

On the concealment count, Adelman’s instructions made clear that Dugan needed to know that ICE wanted to arrest Flores-Ruiz. On the obstruction count, Adelman told jurors that Dugan needed “sufficient knowledge” about the nature of the immigration proceedings at issue.

The mixed verdict shortly followed those instructions, which have been central to Dugan’s attempts to overturn her conviction.

Judge Adelman crafted his instructions on the obstruction charge partly based on an out-of-district precedent that he said he found “persuasive”: U.S. v. Hernandez. Following her conviction, that precedent was overturned.

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‘A case of first impression’

Almost a year after Dugan’s arrest, the Fourth Circuit overturned the case of Dennis Zeledon Hernandez, a noncitizen who escaped from ICE custody and was charged with obstructing his own immigration proceedings.

The federal appellate court found that immigration enforcement does not constitute “pending proceedings.”

For Dugan’s defense, the finding is explosive.

Although Fourth Circuit precedent is not binding on the Eastern District of Wisconsin, it was said to be a “case of first impression,” meaning that no other appellate court had addressed the question. What’s more, the Hernandez precedent overturns the specific lower court ruling that Adelman found “persuasive.”

Adelman appears to agree that Dugan’s argument is substantial.

After initially denying Dugan’s post-trial motions on written briefings alone, Adelman has scheduled oral arguments to decide whether to reconsider his ruling. The ramifications here could be enormous. Dugan resigned her judgeship in the wake of her conviction, and accepting the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning could result in a judgment of acquittal.

As Harry Litman and I discuss, interpreting the statute (18 U.S.C. 1505) to rule out prosecutions for obstructing immigration arrests would disarm the Trump administration’s attempts to threaten judges with felony prosecution for protecting the integrity of their courthouses.

It would also turn a rare victory in a high-profile Trump Justice Department case into another embarrassing defeat.

Oral arguments on the matter are scheduled for Weds., June 3 at 10 a.m. Central Time.

Watch the analysis in full in the video at the top of this newsletter, and read Dugan’s legal brief in full here.

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First, the nation’s Superior Electoral Court banned Jair Bolsonaro from holding public office for eight years, finding that he abused his power by making false and unfounded claims about Brazil’s electronic voting system. Then, Bolsonaro was successfully prosecuted and sentenced to 27 years imprisonment for plotting a coup d’etat.

The provocative premise of Andrew Weissmann’s new book “Liar’s Kingdom: How to Stop Trump’s Deceit and Save America” is that punishing election lies isn’t incompatible with the land of the First Amendment — or an option only available to foreign democracies.

Adopting a global and domestic perspective, Weissmann lays out his argument through personal reflections and accessible explanations of U.S. law and foreign precedent. He notes that the United States already criminalizes or otherwise punishes various forms of intentional lying, drawing from his own experience of prosecuting Enron’s former CEO Ken Lay. Along the way, Weissmann discusses defamation law, former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion prosecution of Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court’s precedent concerning the Stolen Valor Act.

Brainstorming possible solutions to election-related lies, Weissmann drafted a hypothetical Truth in Elections Act that would operate as a civil statute:

“Anyone who knowingly and willfully makes a false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation about the election results or process in any federal election, with an intent to cast doubt on the integrity of the results or process, will have committed a civil offense for which disqualification from elected office may be imposed for up to 8 years. To be found liable for this offense, proof must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. A person found liable hereunder may take an immediate appeal from the decision.

The nod to the Brazilian system is clear through the eight-year disqualification, but the book illustrates how the proposal is grounded in U.S. law and precedent.

During our 52-minute conversation, Andrew Weissmann gets candid about the family and personal history that went into the book, his conversations with a German judge who presided over that country’s ban on Holocaust denial, and how the type of hypothetical statutes he is proposing could be abused by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche or others.

He also explains why he has faith in the U.S. legal system to weed out abusive prosecutions under such laws and believes the cost of refusing to police election lies is higher.

Watch the conversation in full at the top of this newsletter, and order a copy of the book here.

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A three-judge panel on Tuesday unanimously blocked the state of Alabama’s attempt to restore maps that the court previously found intentionally diluted Black voting power.

“Ultimately, we cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” their 79-page order states. “And under the unusual circumstances of this case, we conclude that a limited order requiring the Secretary to continue using this Court’s race-blind map will not disrupt Alabama’s elections (all candidates ran under the race-blind map until fifteen days ago, and all voters remain districted under the race-blind map in electoral computer systems).”

The three-judge panel — composed of two Donald Trump appointees and a Bill Clinton appointee — previously blocked the maps in 2023 for violating the 14th Amendment and Section Two of the Voting Rights Act.

The racially gerrymandered maps would have reduced the number of Black-majority districts from two to one, by extension giving Republicans another likely seat.

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Some life left in the “dead letter”?

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judges Anna M. Manasco and Terry Moorer and U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus found that the same reasoning stands today as it did three years ago, despite a new legal landscape.

“The [Alabama] Legislature well knew that a plan without an additional Black-opportunity district would dilute Black Alabamians’ opportunity to participate in the political process, and it intentionally enacted that very plan,” the order states. “Further, the Legislature well knew what dilutive mechanisms would prevent Black voters in Alabama’s Black Belt and Gulf Coast communities.”

In late April, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, finding that Section Two of the landmark civil rights law required findings of intentional discrimination to enforce. Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent argued that the Roberts Court effectively turned the watershed legislation into a “dead letter” because state authorities tend to hide evidence of racial discrimination behind partisan advantage and other lawful considerations.

In the Alabama case, however, a three-judge panel painstakingly found intentional racial discrimination, following a trial featuring testimony from 51 witnesses and a court record packed with nearly 800 exhibits.

Despite the vast record, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices decided along ideological lines to grant the state of Alabama’s request to vacate that decision, pending another round of review “in light of Louisiana v. Callais.”

In a dissent joined by every liberal colleague, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the lower court remained “free on remand to decide for itself whether Callais has any bearing on its Fourteenth Amendment analysis or if its prior reasoning is unaffected by that decision.”

The three-judge panel found that the latter was the case.

“Callais does not disturb our finding that the Legislature intentionally discriminated based on race when it passed the 2023 Plan,” the panel wrote. “Standing alone, this finding is sufficient for a preliminary injunction.”

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‘No doubt’

The judges wrote that their review of the record leaves “no doubt” that the Alabama legislature intentionally discriminated based on race.

“We reach this conclusion with great reluctance and dismay and even greater restraint — only after another exhaustive analysis of an extensive record, as the Supreme Court’s remand order and its precedent instructs us,” the order states. “We reject in the strongest possible terms the State’s attempt to finish its intentional decision to dilute minority votes with a veneer of legislative regularity.”

Alabama’s Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) already vowed to “immediately appeal” to the Supreme Court, calling the maps “blandly unobjectionable.”

“Know this—in my mind, it is not a matter of whether we win this case, only when,” Marshall wrote in a statement.

Led by civil rights activist Evan Milligan, the plaintiffs behind the lawsuit also include Khadidah Stone, Letetia Jackson, Shalela Dowdy, Greater Birmingham Ministries, and the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP. They are represented by the Legal Defense Fund, American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Alabama, Hogan Lovells LLP, and Wiggins, Childs, Pantazis, Fisher & Goldfarb.

“We are thankful that the district court has again vindicated the constitutional rights of voters in the Black Belt, and we look forward to voting under a fair map this fall,” the plaintiffs and attorneys wrote in a statement. “The court saw through Alabama’s blatant attempt to reinstate a race-based congressional map that the legislature deliberately enacted to deny Black voters a voice in Congress.”

As a result of the ruling, the “race-blind” maps drawn by a court-designated special master will include two Black opportunity districts.

When the Supreme Court restored the 2023 maps, Justice Sotomayor warned her conservative colleagues that the decision would unleash “chaos” in the upcoming election. The three-judge panel wrote that its return to the status quo would have the opposite effect.

“On the unique record before us, we determine that enjoining the 2023 Plan will not disrupt Alabama’s elections,” the order states. “Requiring the use of the Special Master Plan will forestall an expensive, aggressive, and perhaps logistically impossible voter reassignment effort.”

Read the ruling in full here.

The problem with Donald Trump’s early morning post this Memorial Day began with the first word.

Then, it somehow got worse.

“Happy Memorial Day to all, including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military and all of the tremendous success that it has had over the last year,” Trump wrote on social media.

The word to describe a federal holiday in solemn remembrance of the wartime dead isn’t “happy,” no matter how associated the day has become in the popular imagination with barbecues and beaches. Beginning with its post-Civil War era roots, the holiday has been about commemorating fallen soldiers, originally by adorning their graves with flowers and wreaths under an earlier tradition known as “Decoration Day.” Congress formally changed the name to Memorial Day in 1971, but its somber focus remained the same, before Trump turned it into more partisan grist.

Trump, who avoided military service in Vietnam, paid lip service to those who “made the ultimate sacrifice,” a group of people he once described as “losers” and “suckers.” The Atlantic reported that Trump made those comments at a different military cemetery near Paris: the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in 2018. Trump denied the report at the time, only to be contradicted by his own former Chief of Staff John Kelly, who confirmed hearing his former boss making those comments.

This year, Trump made similar comments openly during his speech, calling the Presidential Medal of Freedom “much better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor — because the Medal of Honor recipients are in “very bad shape” or “dead.” Just as he did during his criminal trial, Trump appeared to fall asleep during the ceremony for the fallen. His eyes were closed during Pete Hegseth’s speech about the first Decoration Day mourners.

Trump is sending veterans a similar message through the symbolism of trying to obscure the view of Arlington National Cemetery with a monument to his ego.

On Thursday, three Trump-appointed commissioners from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts approved the design for a 250-foot “Triumphal Arch,” which would be positioned between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The Arch would obscure the views of both landmarks but, as historian Heather Cox Richardson notes, “perfectly” frame Arlington House, a mansion once owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

“The arch does not frame the nation’s honored dead, but frames instead the home of the man who led the armies of the Confederacy that killed them,” she noted.

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A gaudy and gilded nod to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, the monument has taken on an unofficial nickname that hits closer to the mark: It’s a proposed “Arc de Trump,” but it’s not a fait accompli. No sooner had the design plans been confirmed by Trump’s handpicked commissioners than a federal judge cast the plan into doubt.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over Trump’s election subversion criminal case, has been presiding over a lawsuit filed by three veterans and an architectural historian seeking to block the plan from moving forward. On Thursday, Chutkan sharply questioned Trump’s authority to build the arch, pointing out that Congress must approve any major new structure on federally administered land in Washington, D.C.

The vets and historian who filed the complaint deserve recognition:

• Michael Lemmon, the lead plaintiff, is a U.S. Army and Vietnam War veteran and former U.S. Ambassador to Armenia.

• U.S. Navy and Vietnam war veteran Shaun Byrnes served as a Senior Foreign Service Officer and Chief of the U.S. Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission during the Kosovo War.

• U.S. Army and Vietnam War veteran Jon Gundersen served as the Chargé d’Affaires ad interim United States to Ukraine, Estonia, Iceland, and Norway.

In their complaint, all three veterans state that they regularly visit the cemetery to “honor the service” of their “many comrades-in-arms who are buried there.”

According to the lawsuit, Lemmon “hopes to be interred” there.

The fourth plaintiff, Calder Loth, is the now-retired Senior Architectural Historian for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, who has “aesthetic and professional interests in the preservation and protection of historic and cultural resources in Virginia and Washington, D.C.” The four of them are represented by the watchdog group Public Citizen, whose lawsuit notes that Trump’s arch would more than double the height of the Lincoln Memorial.

There’s something symbolically fitting, if appalling, about Trump’s attempt to cast the nation’s most iconic military cemetery in the proverbial shadow of his Arc de Trump.

Trump’s second term has shown him to be flippant and unleashed about committing U.S. soldiers to foreign regime change.

With 13 U.S. service members dead in the Iran War, Trump responded to criticism that he was surrendering to the Islamic Republic’s maximalist demands with social media sabre rattling, posting an image of a bomb marked with his tagline: “THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!”

Trump and his surrogates have strongly suggested that Cuba is next.

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At every turn, Trump has responded to the life-or-death gravity of his decisions with self-aggrandizement and online trolling.

These provocations have sparked opposition in the form of lawsuits and civic engagement. Over the long weekend, activists staged a three-day series of protests, marches, and vigils organized by the group Third Act DMV.

Their name for the protest? “86 the Arch.”

All Rise News will continue to follow and report on opposition to Trump’s arch in the courts and on the streets.

This week’s preview of court listings is below, including the case infamously premised on an off-dictionary definition of “86.”

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In case you missed our coverage at the time, ex-federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner and I unpacked the significance of the decision in a Substack Live in the wake of the then-breaking news.

Watch the full video at the top of this newsletter.

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While presiding over a defamation lawsuit of great interest to Donald Trump, a Florida judge had secretly been lobbying for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.

This week, the Freedom of the Press Foundation demanded that an independent state agency tasked with clamping down on judicial misconduct investigate what they call a clear “conflict of interest.”

Nominated for an appointment to the Southern District of Florida, Judge Jeffrey Kuntz has been serving as the chief judge of Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal.

In late 2024, Kuntz had been assigned to an appeal of Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board for not rescinding their awards for reporting on the Russia investigation. He sat on that panel with his fellow state appellate judge Ed Artau.

At the time, both had been lobbying for a nomination to the federal bench without any apparent disclosure to the Pulitzer Board or the public.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s advocacy chief Seth Stern filed complaints against both judges. Artau was recently confirmed in a party-line vote. Kuntz’s nomination remains pending, and the complaint against him was filed earlier this week.

“The core ethical concern is straightforward: Kuntz presided over a lawsuit brought by the same individual whose approval was necessary to secure the federal judicial appointment Judge Kuntz was actively seeking,” the complaint states. “He did not recuse himself or did not disclose his conflict to the parties. He ruled in favor of the party from whom he was seeking a substantial personal benefit, overlooking glaring weaknesses in his case. These facts raise serious concerns under the Florida Code of Judicial Conduct and warrant a full investigation by this Commission.”

Kuntz’s testimony on the road to confirmation went viral for his refusal to directly answer Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (D-Ct.) questions about whether former President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

At the time of the recording of the video below, Kuntz’s confirmation vote had been slated for Thursday. The confirmation vote has since been postponed.

Free subscribers can watch the interview with Seth Stern on YouTube here — or all of the other videos on the All Rise News playlist of Legal AF.

All Rise News paid subscribers can watch this video and others ad-free below.

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