Holding the far-right to account hasn’t been easy.

“I’ve been investigating hate now for almost three years,” Williams said in a 35-minute Substack Live interview on Monday. “This is tough business. I have security at home that you would not believe. I have faced death threats many times. My family has been threatened.”

So Williams knew just where to look to monitor the far-right’s response to the Trump Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the storied civil rights group and anti-hate watchdog.

“I really started going back into this dark world of white nationalism and various hate groups, and they were just mocking MAGA,” Williams said.

The organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville roasted the theory that the racist riot that they created was an SPLC-fabricated “hoax,” as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed. Williams profiled some of these reactions in a must-read article titled: “Another ‘Epstein Binders’: White Nationalists Mock MAGA Spin on SPLC Indictment.”

One of them, Richard Spencer, called Charlottesville revisionism a “convenient conspiracy theory or limited hangout served up by the government to allow conservatives to indulge in victimization.” Another organizer who goes by the name Augustus Sol Invictus, and was prosecuted for burning an object with the intent to intimidate, rhetorically excommunicated his peers who bought into the MAGA mythology.

“Every ‘right-wing’ influencer pushing this lie that Unite the Right was an SPLC psyop is dead to me,” Invictus wrote.

Williams also observed a darker set of reactions from a man affiliated with a neo-Nazi terror group known as the Atomwaffen Division, who sifted through the indictment to unmask SPLC informants.

This former neo-Nazi believed that “these informants were pretty successful in dismantling hate.”

That far-right extremist’s examination of the indictment is significant: The wire fraud charges against the SPLC hinge upon the allegation that the civil rights group falsely claimed to donors that they were “dismantling” hate groups when they actually enriched and manufactured them.

Watch the full interview at the top of this newsletter, and catch up on related analysis from All Rise News here and here.

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Nearly a decade has passed since hundreds of white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Va., carrying tiki torches and chanting racist slogans.

One of the Hitler-admiring attendees, James Alex Fields, Jr., is serving multiple life sentences for murdering peaceful protester Heather Heyer, and several others were successfully prosecuted for assaulting a Black man and conspiring to riot. They chanted slogans like “Jews will not replace us,” honored a statue of Confederate traitor Robert E. Lee, and intimidated passersby. A federal jury found organizers and participants civilly liable to the tune of $26 million, resulting in a judgment that still hasn’t been paid.

Last week, the Trump administration launched a campaign to whitewash that bloody history by pinning it all on a single informant on the payroll of the Southern Poverty Law Center. That effort is as obscene as it is insulting to anyone’s intelligence.

The ‘Charlottesville hoax’ hoax

On Friday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt floated a conspiracy theory absolving the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other extremist groups of their crimes by labeling their riot the “Charlottesville hoax.”

“That is one of the most vicious and egregious smears that has been used against Trump over the last 11 years since he got into politics,” Leavitt claimed on Fox News. “This group funded some of the funders of that hoax that not only the media ate up like candy but the Democrats ran campaigns on.”

This cannot be soft-pedaled: With the help of right-wing media, Leavitt is lying about the indictment and running interference for white supremacist groups to try to retroactively exonerate Trump of his “very fine people” scandal.

A close read of the SPLC’s charges exposes Leavitt’s lies.

In the 14-page indictment, only one paragraph — which includes only three sentences — discusses any connection to the Charlottesville rally, and there’s no discussion of multiple “funders.” Those allegations relate to a single SPLC informant known as F-37, short for “field source.”

“F-37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. F-37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-37 more than $270,000.00.”

Nothing in these three sentences comes close to depicting the Charlottesville rally as a false flag operation.

From the carefully worded language, there’s little evidence F-37 played any substantial role in organizing the rally. Prosecutors allege that F-37 was a member of an “online leadership chat group,” but they don’t say whether F-37 contributed to the chat as a leader or organizer. F-37 allegedly “helped coordinate transportation” for “several” people. Hundreds attended the rally, and prosecutors don’t say whether F-37 “helped” more than a handful of them find a ride in a van.

Over the course of eight years, F-37 made $270,000 from the SPLC — or roughly $33,750 per year. There’s no allegation that a single SPLC dollar funded the rally itself or paid the informant for services rendered specifically for organizing it.

Based on these allegations, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche described the informant in a Newsmax interview as the “man behind the curtain” of the Charlottesville riot.

Blanche must have known that was a lie because he admitted as much in a different interview.

Pressed by Laura Ingraham, Blanche acknowledged that he didn’t know whether a single informant listed in the indictment could be described as a “leader” of the Charlottesville rally.

“Whether they were the leaders or initiators, we know that will come out eventually,” Blanche said.

Asked what the money was used for, Blanche replied: “We don’t know.”

Blanche’s shocking admission on national TV that he had no evidence for his Charlottesville false flag allegations made no difference to the MAGA faithful. A right-wing podcaster clipped that interview over a photograph of white supremacists at Charlottesville slapped with the word “STAGED.” The dog whistle blown by Blanche ultimately mattered more than the on-screen contradictions to that premise.

‘Battle for the soul of this nation’

Why are Blanche and Leavitt so eager to clear Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other hate groups of the blame for their Charlottesville crime spree?

Leavitt gave away the game in her interview.

“If you recall in 2020, Joe Biden launched his campaign for president on the basis of the Charlottesville hoax,” Leavitt said. “It was a total lie, and it was funded by this organization that claims to stand against racism.”

She was alluding to Biden’s shock at Trump referring to “very fine people on both sides” at the Charlottesville hate rally.

For Biden, Trump’s remarks were representative of his 2020 campaign theme.

“Very fine people on both sides?

With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.

I wrote at the time that we’re in the battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that’s even more true today. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.”

To this day, Trump plays down the public outrage over his comments as a “hoax” because of his other remarks at the same press conference.

“I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?” Trump said at the time.

Certain fact-checkers even backed Trump’s interpretation of his press conference. The problem was, Trump’s comments could most charitably be described as incoherent and more accurately be called a whitewash. The Unite the Right rally was organized entirely by white supremacist organizations. Anyone who stood with them sympathized with their cause, and Trump’s “very fine people” had to have included them. The outrage and revulsion to Trump’s remarks was never a hoax.

By dabbling in Charlottesville revisionism, Trump and his surrogates have chosen a side. They are erasing the white supremacists’ crimes, attacking their enemies, exposing their turncoats, and suggesting that a storied civil rights group manufactured the entire problem for profit.

The far-right always knew what some of the fact-checkers didn’t: Neo-Nazis celebrated Trump’s “very fine people” comments in 2017. As investigative reporting has shown, the rally’s organizers clearly see what’s happening now.

Editor’s Note:

After this column was written, the White House Correspondents Dinner was upended by a would-be shooter allegedly attempting to assassinate Donald Trump. Conspiracy theories about the incident being “staged” quickly spread online, and Trump called those theories “sick.” Observers immediately noted that Trump and his MAGA movement repeatedly cast political violence as a “hoax,” from Charlottesville to the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.

No matter where it falls on the political spectrum, reporting on political violence should remain grounded on rigorous analysis of the facts and the public record. That’s how All Rise News will handle the criminal case of WHCD shooting suspect Cole Allen, whose case is expected to begin on Monday.

His case leads the weekly preview of the court docket below for paid subscribers.

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For her efforts opposing Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Detroit, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson became one of the public officials bearing the brunt of his supporters’ wrath.

“People showed up on my front lawn in Detroit where I live with guns to try to interfere with those results, and to pressure me not to certify or to otherwise not allow the election to go forward,” Benson told All Rise News in a video interview, recounting an infamous incident from December 2020.

Benson’s then-4-year-old son had been inside the house when the armed mob showed up outside to protest.

“These growing voices outside my home were shouting things like ‘You’re a murderer’ and ‘Arrest her’ and ‘Come out and face us’ for the better part of an hour,” Benson recalled. “All that stood between my family and this growing potentially violent assembly of people or mob, for lack of a better word, was one neighborhood security guard on our front porch, and there are videos of this that were then live streamed on social media. I mean, it was terrifying.”

Some six years later, Benson is still fending off Trump’s attempts to discredit elections as Secretary of State, receiving a letter from his Justice Department demanding sensitive voter data in a purported effort to review the 2024 election results in Wayne County.

“It’s been six years of this,” Benson said. “They’ve found no data that shows anything about our elections is awry. Our elections in Michigan and nationwide are safe and secure and accurate. And yet they keep trying to find something, knowing that they likely won’t find anything, but instead will keep the story alive, keep these doubts in people’s mind and thereby set the stage to potentially successfully challenge election results if they don’t like them in the future.”

Far from being intimidated, Benson has remained in politics and is running for governor, hoping to replace Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is term-limited and cannot run again. Whitmer infamously became the target of a failed plot to kidnap her.

“I would be happy to just be a mom of my now almost 10-year-old little boy and return to my work as a civil rights advocate and a teacher. But the work’s not done,” she said.

Watch my full interview with Secretary Benson 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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The day before nationwide protests against a plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention camps, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block the construction of a facility slated to be built directly across from a chemical storage plant.

"If there is a tank rupture or a chemical spill or a fire, emergency responders will be responding to a potential mass casualty event involving hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are locked in and cannot get out," Mayes told reporters at a press conference this morning in Surprise, Ariz., the proposed site of the camp.

Three other lawsuits filed by state AGs remain pending in New Jersey, Michigan, and Maryland, where a federal judge recently issued a preliminary injunction blocking the conversion of a facility that would have held up to 1,500 people.

According to Project Salt Box, the proposed Immigration and Customs Enforcement warehouse in Arizona would be of similar size and occupancy. ICE bought the warehouse for more than $70 million, roughly five times its estimated value, the group’s tracker says.

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‘Dismantling Detention’

The lawsuit is poised to deliver the latest blow to an increasingly cratered pillar of Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Last year, then-Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said he intended for a network of converted warehouses holding immigrants to operate like Amazon Prime, “but with human beings.” The Trump administration has been forced to scale down its ambitions amid nationwide protests and litigation. More ICE warehouse contracts have been cancelled than completed. The projects have come under legal challenges for failing to comply with public notice obligations and environmental law.

The Department of Homeland Security leaders who led the initiative — ex-Secretary Kristi Noem and former Acting Director Lyons — are no longer at their jobs, and Noem’s successor Markwayne Mullins paused new contracts following a record of failure.

But watchdogs and activists aren’t relenting.

Indivisible and other organizers called for a “National Day of Action” on Saturday under the banner of “Dismantling Detention.” An interactive map shows dozens of planned protests across the United States.

“Our position is clear. Cancel the warehouse detention plan and stop every conversion immediately,” Indivisible’s call to action states. “Reject all public funding, permits, and local resources that enable ICE to expand detention. Require full transparency and real community consent before any federal detention action moves forward. Decisions about detention cannot be made behind closed doors.”

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‘Stone’s throw’ away from ‘hazardous chemicals’

Like the other lawsuits, the Arizona complaint alleges that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act’s safeguards against arbitrary and capricious government actions and the National Environmental Policy Act’s protections.

Mayes noted that the laws required input from residents of Surprise, a Maricopa County city that counted a little more than 143,000 people at the time of the last census.

"The Trump administration has run roughshod over federal law in its rush to expand detention capacity across the country," Mayes said. "The federal government did not ask the people of Surprise whether they wanted this facility in their backyards. They simply bought a warehouse, handed a $300 million contract to a private company and told the city to deal with it.”

As noted in the complaint, the warehouse sits a “stone’s throw from a storage facility for hazardous chemicals” — and roughly a mile from a public high school and middle school.

“The Surprise warehouse was constructed as an industrial distribution facility for up to four commercial tenants, not a space to house hundreds of human beings,” the complaint notes. “Because [the Trump administration] failed to conduct any environmental analysis, the State has no idea how defendants plan to modify the Surprise warehouse for its new intended purpose. As constructed, though, the Surprise warehouse almost certainly does not have the appropriate water and wastewater infrastructure to safely (and humanely) house hundreds of people.”

Read the 34-page complaint in full here.

Even accepting the allegations at face value, the 14-page indictment shows no evidence of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s claim that the SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” Prosecutors allege that the SPLC deceived donors by claiming to “dismantle” hate groups that they were actually enriching. The numbers do not add up to that narrative.

During an interview on Substack Live, former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner explains what the indictment reveals about the SPLC’s work. Here are a few themes to look out for in the video.

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Putting the numbers in context

Prosecutors allege that the SPLC spent more than $3 million on informants between 2014 and 2023, over the course of roughly a decade.

If the Justice Department’s numbers are accurate, the SPLC’s payments to informants represented a drop in the bucket of their total expenditures. The SPLC publicly reported roughly $129 million in revenue and expenses in 2024 alone, the most recent year for which their filings are public. A review of public filings show that was a fairly typical year, and the SPLC’s informant network amounted to a fraction of a single percentage point of its revenue and expenditures.

In return, the SPLC obtained information from well-placed and high-ranking informants within the country’s worst hate groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, and neo-Nazi affiliates. The indictment provides only a glimpse of the fruits of their investment.

According to the indictment, those informants provided intelligence into some of the most notorious gatherings of extremists in recent memory, including deep access into the planning and coordination of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally that led to the murder of Heather Heyer. One SPLC source allegedly stole dozens of boxes of documents to publicly spill the secrets of a “violent extremist group” on the group’s public website.

The SPLC shared its intelligence with the federal government to disrupt and prosecute extremist networks for decades, until FBI director Kash Patel cut ties with the group last October. Prosecutors don’t disclose how many criminal cases resulted from the information that the SPLC obtained from their informants before that relationship ended.

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Why this case would interest Trump

Late last year, Patel called the SPLC a “partisan smear machine.”

That rhetoric against the civil rights group has been par for the course for conservatives in recent years, many of whom were enraged by the group listing Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA as an example of the “Hard Right” featured in a report on hate and extremism.

Beyond becoming a lightning rod for conservative outrage, the SPLC’s prosecution could be politically useful to Trump for other reasons. Prosecutors say that one of the SPLC’s sources participated in the group leadership chat for the “Unite the Right” rally, where tiki-torch wielding extremists protested the removal of a Confederate statue before one murdered an activist.

Trump infamously said that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the protest.

Epner predicted that the Trump administration would use the case to create a false narrative that the SPLC financed it.

“That could not be further from the truth,” Epner said.

“What happened — even just taking this indictment on its face — was that the SPLC was paying off rats within the Nazi party, the Klan, and the other groups that were part of that tiki-torch rally.” He then continued, adding that the SPLC routinely shared the information acquired from the informants with federal and local law enforcement to prepare them for the fallout from these gatherings.

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The charges

Prosecutors charged the SPLC with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank, and a charge of conspiring to commit money laundering.

Those charges closely mirror allegations against Trump ally Steve Bannon for defrauding donors of We Build the Wall, a crowdfunding initiative for a U.S.-Mexico barrier.

During his first term, Trump pardoned Bannon for his role in the wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, and Bannon later pleaded guilty to similar state charges in Manhattan.

Epner said that Trump could view the SPLC case as revenge.

“I think that he takes a look at how he or his people, as he thinks about them, have been prosecuted and says, ‘How can we do that to them?’” Epner said.

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‘Mortal danger’

The SPLC’s indictment technically shields the names of their informants, known as “field sources,” but those identities are likely thinly veiled to the extremist groups they were infiltrating.

Prosecutors laid out detailed information about the roles that the SPLC’s sources held within extremist groups and the periods in which they held them.

Epner said that several of those sources may already be in “mortal danger.”

“These are groups of people who think of themselves as killers and would want to kill people they think of as being traitors,” he said. “If this case moves forward, it really risks exposure of the specific identities of who the traitors were.”

That’s only one of the ways extremist groups have already benefited from the Trump Justice Department’s indictment immediately after the filing of this case.

“This is literally the Trump DOJ saying, ‘The SPLC are the bad guys, and the people you think are bad guys don’t really exist. They’re figments of your imagination,’” Epner noted.

Read the indictment here, and watch the full interview at the top of this newsletter.

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As put it, you’re building the plane in mid-fight.

I’ve found that to be true. An independent journalist abandons a large support staff, steady paycheck, and all the comforts that come with large and sprawling institutional backing. You learn to be plucky, nimble and adventurous, and if you’re lucky, you draw from the lessons and guidance of your peers who moved into this space.

When launching All Rise News exactly one year ago, I was fortunate enough to have one of the world’s most preeminent legal experts as my Substack Live guest: , a former FBI general counsel, ex-Mueller prosecutor and Justice Department stalwart whom I’m proud to count as a friend. (Not too long ago, we were also MSNBC colleagues routinely discussing Donald Trump’s criminal trial with the great Lawrence O’Donnell.) We marked the one-year anniversary with another live-stream — and a new lesson about the improvisation that is independent journalism.

Roughly halfway through the broadcast, Andrew lost his connection.

We had a lot to discuss: Kash Patel’s new lawsuit against The Atlantic; the magazine’s bombshell reporting about the FBI director’s drinking; former Capitol Police officer Shauni Kerkhoff’s defamation lawsuit over the propagators of a conspiracy theory falsely tying her to the attempted Jan. 6 pipe bombing; and the Trump Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the storied civil rights group.

I’m glad that Andrew could join the conversation again — before the technical difficulties — and I hope that you will stick around for my reporting and comments after his feed dropped.

All Rise into the new year. Onward!

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When this newsletter launched last year, All Rise News championed a form of journalism that rejects despair and recognizes that people power can beat back authoritarian assaults on our democracy.

As the past year showed, that faith was warranted, and that approach was needed.

Since the first day of his second term, Donald Trump has been on a relentless campaign to use the government he controls as an instrument to enrich himself, reward his allies and bludgeon his critics. The damage cannot be minimized, and it will take generations to repair the blow to U.S. institutions, standing, and reputation. From his dismantling of USAID alone, hundreds of thousands of people have died globally, and his federal agents have killed two people on the streets of Minneapolis.

But this is also undeniable: Trump’s most brazen second-term ambitions lie in shambles.

Far from filling the jails with his enemies, Trump suffered humiliating defeats before putting the Justice Department under new leadership. The U.S. Federal Reserve remains independent. Trump’s military occupations of U.S. cities have been disbanded after being ruled illegal. Historic protests against him keep shattering records in their size and global reach. More of Trump’s contracts for immigration warehouses have been cancelled than completed, and that aspect of his mass deportation scheme is now on pause. Viktor Orbán, his strongman ally in Hungary, suffered a landslide defeat, even after a last-minute PR blitz from Trump and J.D. Vance to bail out the crumbling regime. Elections keep showing Trump’s Republican party losing support by the double digits, and his prospects for the midterms are looking grim.

To put a spin on an old political slogan, are you more hopeful today than you were one year ago?

If so, I hope you will keep supporting this newsletter into its second year. All Rise News celebrates its one-year anniversary on Tuesday, and we have so much more work to do together.

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None of this was inevitable

If you have been a subscriber from the beginning, you learned about these events in real time, and you probably haven’t been surprised by Trump’s reversal of fortune.

You have sent me to courthouses in Georgia, Maryland, New York, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin, and elsewhere to cover cases critically important to our democracy. You have seen Trump’s retaliatory prosecutions collapse in real time. You understand that the indictments of James Comey and Letitia James were never about candor to Congress or accuracy on mortgage applications. They were about retribution and intimidation. You recognize that the Trump Justice Department’s crusade against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Governor Lisa Cook aimed at control of the nation’s central bank, a key ambition of all budding autocrats.

You have watched these and other power grabs fall short and fall apart, including his attempt to ban birthright citizenship, unilaterally impose tariffs, seize sensitive voter data, and punish blue states with military occupation.

You know that none of these outcomes were inevitable, and all of them required the investment of time, resources and attention to pull the democratic levers of power. Institutions aren’t abstractions that preserve themselves. They require people protecting our ideals, often at great personal danger and expense.

There was a time when the Epstein Files Transparency Act was widely considered a dead letter in a Republican-controlled Congress. Press attention and organizing by survivors changed that. Who knows what else Trump’s government would have swept under the rug if people, institutions and civil society didn’t stand up?

Some media conglomerates and major law firms capitulated to Trump’s pressure to enter into settlements for tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-bono services. Those that refused to bend to extortionate litigation prevailed, and an independent and insubordinate press is growing in its power, reach and diversity.

Forget about trying to control a vast, vibrant and unruly democracy in the United States. Even using the full weight and force of the U.S. government, Trump keeps losing legal battles to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a vilified, powerless, undocumented immigrant who has been on an unbroken winning streak since being illegally abducted to a foreign gulag.

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What we’ve accomplished

If All Rise News did nothing more than make readers feel more empowered, energized and encouraged, I would regard this project as a success.

One year ago, I recognized that going independent was a risk. I didn’t know whether I would be able to make a living by abandoning a steady paycheck from legacy news organizations, and I didn’t know whether I would be able to invest any of my income in the news-gathering required to continue shoe-leather reporting. With your support, I’ve been able to meet those goals and dream bigger.

In its first year, All Rise News cracked the Top 30 bestsellers on Substack in the news category, leapfrogging past newsletters that have been on this platform for years. That’s a humbling achievement: Substack has more than 50,000 revenue-earning publications. This newsletter goes out nearly every day to tens of thousands of people in every U.S. state and more than 100 countries around the world. Subscribers sent me to courthouses across the country to record history unfolding — and allow me to access the transcripts, court records, and other tools that I need to complete my work.

Through a strategic partnership with Legal AF, All Rise News regularly features professionally edited video dispatches with some of the top news-makers, including state attorneys general, U.S. senators, and everyday people who stood up to the Trump administration in court and won.

All Rise News reporting has been featured internally on scores of major news organizations — among them, CNN, the BBC, The Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, and an Australian documentary titled “Diabolical: The Epstein Files” that aired on that country’s esteemed “60 Minutes” program. We’re just getting started, and your continued support means more now than ever.

If you started your annual subscription last year, your continued support will help determine the longevity of this newsletter, and your decision to upgrade a membership to paid could be the push needed to upscale this editorial mission. That means more verified information from the courts, more reporting on your rights and powers in our democracy, and deeper insights into opportunities for high-impact civic engagement and peaceful protest.

Recently, I was the only reporter who attended a pretrial hearing in Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s false arrest and malicious prosecution lawsuit against disqualified former U.S. Attorney Alina Habba. Without your support, the hearing would have had no public witness. Scaling up this newsletter means more national attention to the important and overlooked cases.

That goal is now more attainable than ever.

Whether or not you can afford a paid subscription at this time, I want to take this moment to express gratitude to everyone who has followed this newsletter’s journey over the past year.

We’ve risen together.

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“Before Trump, there was Orbán.”

So says Princeton Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, the leading scholar of former Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán’s system of autocratic legalism.

Since his landslide election last Sunday, opposition leader Peter Magyar has begun the work that he promised of “system change,” and one of his most groundbreaking revelations was that Orbán’s Hungarian state had been diverting taxpayer money to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), a practice that Magyar promised to investigate as a potential “criminal offense.”

Magyar’s statement would only be surprising for those who have not been following MAGA’s ties to Hungary’s departing strongman.

As previously reported on All Rise News, those ties run deep: CPAC has held four annual conferences in Budapest, celebrating and strategizing ways for the United States to emulate Orbán’s anti-democratic government. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 modeled much of Trump’s agenda on Orbán, including dismantling the administrative state, centralizing executive power, and exerting control over the media and universities.

“There are lots of elements of how Orbán captured the state that the Project 2025 people captured,” Scheppele said, citing strategies to weaponize the national budget and attack the civil service.

In the U.S. context, Scheppele recognized this in the defunding of universities and public institutions and mass firings of civil servants.

“Those who remain are terrified to lose their jobs and they'll follow you wherever you go,” Scheppele said.

She said that such extreme measures allowed Orbán to consolidate power in Hungary within three years, rigging elections in his favor through extreme gerrymandering and banishing opposition leaders from state media.

“It went very fast, and after he had everything locked down in Hungary, he then started to get international ambitions,” she added.

In the full interview, Scheppele explains how a system that reinforced his power fell so precipitously and decisively after 16 years in power. She also explains how the private institutions that upheld his power and grew his international network remain in place, continuing to inspire Trump and others on the global right.

Watch my interview with her in full on the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF.

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U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy, a Trump appointee, found that Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon’s stated rationale “does not plausibly relate to individual voting rights.”

During a Substack Live broadcast immediately after the ruling, the Law and Chaos podcast’s and I unpacked the reasons, background and consequences of this defeat.

Dhillon sued 29 states and the District of Columbia in pursuit of the voter data, and every judge who ruled on this offensive so far has rejected her gambit.

All Rise News has been following these cases closely, and readers can catch up on our previous coverage here.

As explained in the broadcast, this was the case where the Justice Department’s Voting Section chief Eric Neff was forced to admit that he misled the court about the government’s handling of the data.

Watch the discussion to learn more about Dhillon, Neff, and the record of the once-storied Justice Department branches that they lead, and read Judge McElroy’s 14-page memorandum and order here.

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For several months, Trump’s Department of Justice has tried to threaten local prosecutors to prevent them from bringing criminal cases against federal agents for crimes connected to immigration raids in U.S. cities.

On Thursday, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty threw down the gauntlet and made clear that she wouldn’t be intimidated, unveiling the first criminal case filed against an ICE agent during Trump’s second term.

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‘Crazy person driving down the road’

ICE agent Gregory Donnell Morgan, Jr., 35, stands accused of pointing a gun at two motorists in Minneapolis.

Prosecutors say that the incident took place at the interchange of Minnesota State Highway 62 and I-35W in Minneapolis on the afternoon of Feb. 5, 2026. As cars lined up to merge, one of the victims saw Morgan approaching from behind on the right shoulder in a black Ford Expedition, according to court papers.

The passengers told authorities that they didn’t know Morgan was a federal agent, as there were no markings on his vehicle or clothing to indicate that. Believing that Morgan was trying to illegally bypass traffic, the driver acknowledged trying to “cut him off a little bit.” Prosecutors say that’s when Morgan pointed a gun at the car, and the passengers called for help.

“This particular case came to us through the Minnesota State Patrol,” Moriarty told All Rise News in a video interview. “They respond to incidents on our highways, and so they received a 911 call from the occupants of the car who had been threatened by Mr. Morgan.”

One of the victims told investigators that she thought Morgan was a “crazy person driving down the road aiming guns at people, ... the type of individual that should [not] be out there but they are,” according to a statement of probable cause.

Morgan faces two felony counts of assault with a dangerous weapon, each carrying the maximum sentence of seven years in prison.

There is an active, nationwide warrant for his apprehension, a measure that Moriarty said will make life difficult for him until he surrenders.

“I do want to make it clear, it is very hard to live an ordinary life with an active felony warrant out for you,” she said, noting that a background check or a speeding stop could lead to his arrest.

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‘Transparency and Accountability Project’

The first local prosecutor to test her power to hold federal agents criminally accountable, Moriarty has plenty of high-profile matters on her plate.

She has been pursuing homicide investigations into federal agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as a separate investigation into the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis, who survived being shot in the leg. The government refused to cooperate with any of these investigations, leading Moriarty to submit a so-called Touhy demand for the requested information.

When Trump’s Justice Department denied or failed to respond to those requests, Moriarty responded with a federal lawsuit that remains pending. She said that she has not heard from the federal government since charges were announced against Morgan.

Beyond the newly filed criminal case, Moriarty revealed that she has been pursuing more than a dozen other investigations since announcing her office’s Transparency and Accountability Project last month. One of the investigations is looking into the former face of Operation Metro Surge: ex-Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who was seen throwing a gas canister into a crowd of protesters.

Moriarty said that her office has interviewed more than 50 witnesses in connection with 17 investigations.

“So we continue to do investigation on those cases,” she said.

In October, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche threatened local authorities in California with prosecution if they bring criminal cases against federal agents, calling any such investigations “illegal and futile.” The threats seem to have failed across the country. California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois now have online portals to collect evidence of crimes committed by federal agents.

The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read the statement of probable cause against Morgan here.

Look out for my full interview with Attorney Moriarty soon on , as well as a separate conversation with California Attorney General Rob Bonta about his recent antitrust victory against Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

On Tax Day, a little more than five years after the Jan. 6th insurrection, the mastermind of the legal prong of Donald Trump’s “coup in search of a legal theory” finally had to pay the piper.

John Eastman played an instrumental role in plotting an effort to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, leading to his appearance in Trump’s state and federal indictments.

Now, he’s been disbarred.

“The court orders that John Charles Eastman (Respondent), State Bar Number 193726, is disbarred from the practice of law in California and that Respondent's name is stricken from the roll of attorneys,” the docket entry reads.

Eastman unsuccessfully tried to persuade former Vice President Mike Pence to try to illegally reject electoral college votes and send them back to the states.

In the fallout, the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol sent Eastman a subpoena pursuing information about the legal campaign to subvert the election. That pursuit resulted in a historic ruling where a federal judge found that Eastman and Trump both likely committed federal felonies.

“Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history. Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower—it was a coup in search of a legal theory,” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter wrote in 2022. “The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.”

Carter’s ruling long predated Trump’s eventual prosecution and predicted two of the crimes to be charged against him: conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstructing an official proceeding.

In 2023, the California State Bar filed 11 disciplinary charges against Eastman, starting a years-long process that included a 35-day trial.

A trial judge recommended Eastman’s disbarment the following year, which was finalized on Wednesday following years of review.

States United Democracy Center, an advocacy group that filed a bar complaint against Eastman in late 2021, called the California Supreme Court’s decision a “reckoning for those who seek to undermine the rule of law in this country.”

“While Trump tries to consolidate power, the states and courts continue to successfully check executive overreach and the unlawful actions of his administration,” the group’s senior vice president Christine P. Sun said in a statement.

POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney reports:

“Though the decision only applies to Eastman’s license to practice law in California, disbarment decisions are typically adopted by authorities in other jurisdictions in “reciprocal” rulings. Eastman is also a member of the bar in Washington, D.C., though his license has been suspended there as well.”

Eastman is expected to appeal the decision.

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Watch my conversation with Allison Gill on this topic in the video at the top of this newsletter, and read more context about the decision below.

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For a second time, a divided D.C. Circuit blocked a federal judge from pursuing possible criminal contempt findings over the Trump administration’s March 2025 deportation flights to El Salvador.

U.S. Circuit Court Judges Neomi Rao and Justin Walker, who were both appointed by Donald Trump, granted a writ of mandamus blocking any contempt inquiry. Their Biden-appointed colleague Judge J. Michelle Childs dissented, warning of the consequences of the decision.

“Contempt of court is a public offense, and the fate of our democratic republic will depend on whether we treat it as such,” her dissent began. “In the many forms in which it can be committed, contempt degrades the power that the People, through their Constitution and Congress, gave the federal courts. Without the contempt power, the rule of law is an illusion, a theory that stands upon shifting sands. For contempt offends not only the authority of whichever judge has been subjected to such incursions, but it also offends our system of governance. Addressing contempt is, therefore, a responsibility that is part and parcel of the court’s duty to interpret and apply the laws of the governed.”

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A tangled, yearlong road

A little more than a year ago, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act declaring that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua amounted to an invasion, using the designation to load more than 200 men onto deportation flights in late March. Most had no criminal records, a CBS investigation confirmed.

Chief U.S. District Judge James (“Jeb”) Boasberg quickly called for a hearing, ordering the government to either turn the flights around or bar the men’s transfer to Salvadoran custody. Boasberg later issued a written order blocking the government from removing the men from the United States. The government claimed to interpret the written order as walking back Boasberg’s ruling from the bench.

The Trump administration then transferred the original deportation flights to El Salvador, leading Boasberg to pursue criminal contempt inquiries for roughly a year.

In the first round, Boasberg found probable cause to believe that the government engaged in criminal contempt, initiating a process to discover who violated his order and whether to refer the matter for prosecution.

The legal landscape changed on the long road to appeal.

Former Justice Department employee turned whistleblower Erez Reuveni told Congress that then-senior DOJ official Emil Bove instructed government lawyers to be prepared to tell judges “f—- you.” That didn’t stop Senate Republicans from confirming Bove, one of Trump’s former criminal defense attorneys, to a lifetime seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

In August, a divided D.C. Circuit panel vacated Boasberg’s probable cause finding: Two Trump appointees, Judges Rao and Gregory Katsas, voted in the majority, and Judge Cornelia Pillard (Obama) dissented. Reviewing the decision en banc, the D.C. Circuit’s full bench declined to reinstate Boasberg’s probable cause finding, but the majority found that the contempt proceedings could move forward because Rao and Katsa couldn’t agree on whether to dismiss it.

Once the case returned to his courtroom, Boasberg scheduled a hearing that would feature testimony from Reuveni and Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign. Such a hearing would have turned up the pressure on government officials and Bove, a now-sitting judge.

In the wake of the second D.C. Circuit ruling, that reckoning has been postponed indefinitely, but it could reemerge later.

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‘A blow to the rule of law’

The American Civil Liberties Union’s attorney Lee Gelernt, representing the deported immigrants, vowed to seek another en banc review before the D.C. Circuit’s bench.

“The opinion is a blow to the rule of law,“ Gelernt told All Rise News. “Our system is built on the executive branch, including the president, respecting court orders. In this case there is no longer any question that the Trump administration willfully violated the court’s order.”

Trump’s Justice Department has vilified Boasberg for pursuing the contempt proceedings, filing a failed disciplinary complaint against him and trying to gin up support for his impeachment on Capitol Hill.

Now, two D.C. Circuit panels — dominated by Trump appointees — have given him an extraordinary kind of rebuke, overturning his decision through a rarely granted legal maneuver known as a writ of mandamus. Now-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wasted no time in using that development to attack Boasberg by name once again.

“Today’s decision by the DC Circuit should finally end Judge Boasberg’s year-long campaign against the hardworking Department attorneys doing their jobs fighting illegal immigration,” Blanche wrote on X.

Even in overruling Boasberg, Judge Walker went out of his way to praise his reputation and express sympathy for his situation.

“I do not envy the position of any judge facing such time pressure to make hard and high-stakes legal decisions,” Walker wrote. “Fortunately, the trial judge assigned to this case had more than two decades of judicial experience, with a widely respected record of dispassionate decisionmaking.”

Rao and Walker accepted the Justice Department’s position that the government didn’t defy Boasberg’s ruling because of its interpretation of his written order.

Childs warned about the precedent that sets.

“Now, any litigant can argue, based on their preferred interpretation of a court’s order, that they did not commit contempt before contempt findings are even made,” she wrote.

Read the opinions and dissents here.

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A federal judge dismissed Donald Trump's lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch and his media empire on Monday, rejecting claims that the Wall Street Journal's exposé of Trump's contribution to Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday book amounted to defamation.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayle gave Trump’s legal team another chance to refile an amended complaint by April 27.

Trump’s legal team vowed to take up the judge’s invitation.

‘Nowhere close to the standard’

Pursuing the lawsuit would keep alive a story that Trump has tried desperately to outrun.

In July, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Trump contributed a “bawdy” entry for a birthday scrapbook Ghislaine Maxwell stitched together for Epstein: a drawing of a “naked woman” with “small arcs” denoting her breasts and the name “Donald” signed over her crotch, mimicking pubic hair.

Denying the story as “fake,” Trump sued Murdoch, the Journal, and the reporters. Then, Epstein’s birthday book became public pursuant to a House Oversight Committee subpoena to Epstein’s estate, indicating that it remained in Epstein’s control since he received it as a gift in 2003. The book showed that the Trump letter was exactly as the Journal had described — and perhaps, even worse.

“The breasts on this figure are clearly those of a very young woman, not of the sort of voluptuous beauties that Donald Trump himself tends towards,” former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner said in an interview.

Spanning more than 200 pages, Epstein’s birthday book has dozens of contributors, and only Trump has disputed the authenticity. Trump’s entry appears roughly two-thirds of the way into the book. Researchers matched his signature and typeface to other letters Trump wrote during that time, and Trump has an even tougher burden than proving an outlandish premise.

To win a defamation case, Trump needs to show that the Journal acted with “actual malice” by knowingly publishing a forgery or deliberately failing to investigate whether it was genuine.

The judge found that Trump’s lawsuit “comes nowhere close to the standard.”

“Quite the opposite,” the ruling states. “The article explains that, before running the story, Defendants contacted President Trump, Justice Department officials, and the FBI for comment. President Trump responded with his denial, the Justice Department did not respond at all, and the FBI declined to comment. In short, the complaint and article confirm that Defendants attempted to investigate.”

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‘Like a marlin on a fish line’

For now, Judge Gayle put off ruling on whether Trump will be forced to pay The Wall Street Journal’s attorneys’ fees under anti-SLAPP law, a statute designed to punish litigation designed to chill free speech.

The Journal said that this is exactly the type of lawsuit such laws were meant to combat.

“In an affront to the First Amendment, the President of the United States brought this lawsuit to silence a newspaper for publishing speech that was subsequently proven true by documents released by Congress to the American public,” the paper’s motion to dismiss says. “By its very nature, this meritless lawsuit threatens to chill the speech of those who dare to publish content that the President does not like.”

Moving ahead with the lawsuit could leave Trump on the hook for Murdoch’s legal fees when the litigation ends, and legal experts noted that those could add up.

“The Wall Street Journal here is paying a lot of money for very good lawyers to defend it, and they’re doing a very good job,” Epner said. “And being required to pay the legal fees for most people would be an enormous disincentive to continue a frankly frivolous lawsuit.”

Epner says that’s not true for Trump, who has raked in billions in cryptocurrency over his presidency and likely views the tab as a “rounding error.”

“He’s desperately thrashing about like a marlin on a fish line, trying to figure out any way to get out from here,” Epner said. “Now, I don’t think that there is a way out for him, but Donald Trump has made his fortune in continuing to fight things that other people would say there’s no upside to fighting. And there have been millions upon millions of Americans who have chosen to believe him over their own lying eyes.”

Trump has had some luck forcing media giants like ABC and CBS to fold in lawsuits widely viewed as dubious by threatening the vindictive use of White House power.

Epner wouldn’t make any predictions about whether News Corporation would follow suit.

“I don’t guess what Rupert Murdoch’s going to do, because the only thing I know for certain about the future is it hasn’t happened yet,” he said. “What I think it means is that up until now, that part I can comment about, is that Rupert Murdoch decided that he was not going to be played for a punk in the way that the Disney Corporation was and that CBS was.”

Read the full order here.

Watch the full video interview with Epner on ’s All Rise News playlist below.

When launching almost exactly a year ago, All Rise News put out a mission statement that began: “Global authoritarianism is on the march, and the president of the United States has cast our lot with the autocrats.”

The image of Vice President J.D. Vance stumping last week for Hungary’s pro-Kremlin strongman Viktor Orbán — with Donald Trump dialing via phone in for a personal endorsement — represented a stomach-churning illustration of that observation. Trump tried to sweeten the pot by vowing to boost the Hungarian economy if voters kept Orbán in office.

The people of Hungary ignored their endorsement.

On Sunday, Orbán lost the election in a landslide, representing a geopolitical earthquake rattling Putinism and Trumpism in its aftershocks. Opposition leader Peter Magyar and his party Tisza won control of more than two-thirds of the Parliament, amounting to a supermajority capable of delivering on Magyar’s promise of “system change” through constitutional amendments. The margin of defeat proved far too wide for Orbán to follow Trump’s lead and claim fraud. The second-order effects will be felt globally and within the MAGA movement. Vladimir Putin loses an ally whose spoiler votes helped block €90 billion in European Union aid to Ukraine. The so-called “illiberal democratic” model for Europe’s radical right in France, Germany and the Netherlands no longer feels so entrenched in Europe.

Inside the United States, MAGA’s intellectual leaders held up Orbán as an inspiration. The Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) has held four annual conferences in Budapest, celebrating and strategizing ways for the United States to emulate Orbán’s anti-democratic government. The gatherings marked a long-term investment into reorienting conservative intellectual thought into a global authoritarian agenda. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 modeled much of Trump’s agenda on Orbán, including dismantling the administrative state, centralizing executive power, and exerting control over the media and universities.

For Princeton University professor Kim Scheppele, the preeminent scholar of Hungary’s system of autocratic legalism, Orbán’s electoral rout represents a decisive victory for liberal democracy and a blow to the global far right.

However, she warned that Orbán embedded his political influence in private institutions that would outlast his hold on power.

“These institutions that have provided the training ground and the conferences and the sponsorship of CPAC, for example,” Scheppele said. “They have all been funded in such a way that they don’t depend on the state budget.”

Only two years ago, Magyar broke with Orbán’s Fidesz party, running as a center right candidate and achieving success as the charismatic voice of his party.

“Is he going to tack nationalist, or is he going to walk into Orbán’s system, sit in Orbán’s chair, and just drive the car from there?” she asked.

For Scheppele, none of the questions about Orbán’s remaining architecture of power, Hungary’s stacked constitutional court, or what Magyar will do about the supermajority power he has obtained should detract from the “immense victory.”

“The favorite children’s book in Hungary is ‘Winnie the Pooh,’ and everybody identifies with Eeyore,” Scheppele wryly noted, referring to the pessimistic and morose donkey.

After Orbán conceded defeat on Sunday, that mood appeared absent in Hungarian opposition media’s broadcast of Magyar’s victory speech. The enormous crowds watching along the Danube could be heard acknowledging the international impact of the victory in multilingual chants of “Power to the people” in English and “Sí se puede” in Spanish, as their leader delivered his remarks in Hungarian.

Back in the United States, Trump’s reaction to his failed attempt to prop up Orbán was muted. Trump did not react to Orbán’s defeat on Truth Social by press time, ranting instead about Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz — and announcing his plan to respond in kind with a U.S. Navy blockade. Domestically, Trump’s job approval ratings dropped to a new record low. Between reaction to the Epstein files and the Iran War, Trump’s former allies Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene have called to oust him under the 25th Amendment, as have more than 80 Democratic lawmakers.

Meanwhile, Orbán’s downfall exposes the weakness of the so-called “Trump effect” in Europe and the illusion of the illiberal right’s juggernaut.

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Nearly one year into the launch of All Rise News, I’m proud of this newsletter’s global audience in more than 100 countries. This newsletter has always acknowledged that the illiberal forces attacking democracy, the rule of law, and people power are globalized and networked.

Jailed Turkish opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu stood among those heartened by Hungary’s election results.

“From a prison cell in Silivri, I send my warmest congratulations to the Hungarian opposition leader Peter Magyar and to every voter who stood in line to defend the rule of law,” İmamoğlu wrote on X. “Your victory belongs to all of us who believe that ballots are stronger than fear, and that justice, however delayed, is never defeated.”

“Istanbul stands with Budapest. The tide is turning,” he added.

İmamoğlu, the former mayor of Istanbul, faces more than 2,300 years in prison from the charges of a Kafkaesque, 3,900-page mass corruption indictment. Human rights defenders call the case political payback for his effective opposition to strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling AK Party.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also celebrated the election results, saying that the continent’s heart is “beating stronger in ​Hungary tonight."

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries described Orbán’s defeat as a preview for Trump’s coalition later this year: “Trump sycophants and MAGA extremists in Congress are up next in November. Winter is coming."

From its inception, All Rise News stood for a type of reporting that combats feelings of helplessness and fatalism in an age of democratic backsliding, by highlighting how people use the levers of power to fight back against authoritarian actions. That’s the ethos of the column “Rising This Week,” highlighting the important court hearings and opportunities for civic engagement.

Paid subscribers can find those weekly listings below.

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What happened during the short time when Donald Trump entered the Supreme Court to attend oral arguments over a central pillar of his immigration policy, his attempt to ban birthright citizenship, and watched that scheme seem to collapse before his eyes?

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who was part of the coalition that sued over the ban, sat in the same row with Trump when it took place.

“He was sort of hunched over, elbows on knees, looking at his hands at times,” Bonta told All Rise News in a video interview, adding that Trump seemed to be there only to intimidate the justices with his presence.

The act of witnessing events in courthouses and state houses across the country matters, and Bonta notes it’s being threatened by media consolidation, which is why he filed an antitrust lawsuit opposing Nexstar’s merger with fellow broadcast giant TEGNA.

On Friday night, a federal judge extended an order blocking the merger for another week.

If completed, the merged Nexstar and TEGNA would reach more than 80 percent of U.S. households through their network of total TV satellite stations, mostly branded as Big Four affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox.

“When you have a consolidation of local broadcast news, you're going to see job loss and then you're going to see a diminishing of perspectives — of voices, of storytellers, of witnesses to the news — to a particular angle in the news or a particular story or a particular interest,” Bonta told All Rise News.

As California’s AG, Bonta noted that the effect of the merger was immediate and hit close to home with layoffs at KTLA, the Nexstar-owned Los Angeles channel.

“So this isn’t just an intellectual exercise or an imagined outcome. It’s happening and more of it will happen,” he said. “There will be less people to bear witness and less people to story tell and less perspectives being shared.”

Watch my interview with Bonta in full on the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF.

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“The curtailment of First Amendment rights is dangerous at any time, and even more so in a time of war,” U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman wrote in a 20-page ruling. “Suppression of political speech is the mark of an autocracy, not a democracy as the Framers recognized when they drafted the First Amendment.”

On March 20, Judge Friedman ordered the Pentagon to return press credentials to reporters who refused to sign onto a highly restrictive new policy, and Hegseth’s special advisor and fixer Tim Parlatore immediately announced his plans to circumvent the order by amending the policy.

“We used more words to say the same thing and to foreclose creative misinterpretations,” Parlatore openly told the New York Times, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Calling the comment the “definition of contempt,” the newspaper asked the judge to enforce his order without explicitly requesting any sanctions.

As former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner and I discussed on Substack Live, Friedman responded with a fiery ruling but no path for finding the government in contempt.

“At some point, we’ve got to see contempt make a showing or else the Pete Hegseths of the world and others in Trump’s cabinet will just continue with impunity to violate court orders to the detriment of the rule of law, the Constitution and ultimately the American people,” Kirschner said.

Later in the conversation, we discussed the Trump Justice Department’s failed efforts to sue states for their voter roll data and the latest update in Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s lawsuit against Alina Habba, who unsuccessfully tried to prosecute the mayor for trespassing.

All Rise News attended a hearing on Thursday in federal court in Newark, where no other reporter was present. Find out more about what happened in the video at the top of this newsletter.

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After helping push Donald Trump’s lost cause as one of his 2020 campaign lawyers, now-Justice Department Civil Rights chief Harmeet Dhillon built upon her unbroken string of defeats in her coast-to-coast effort to demand that states turn over voter roll data.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts found that Dhillon failed to provide the “the basis and the purpose” for her demand, as required by the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

“Put simply, the statute requires a statement of why the Attorney General demands production of the requested records—and, as conveyed by the statute’s use of the definite article, the statement must be ‘the’ factual basis, not just a conceivable or possible basis,” U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin wrote in a 13-page order.

Dhillon, who tried to discredit Joe Biden’s electoral victory in her role as co-chair of Lawyers for Trump, has been the tip of the spear of Trump’s effort to use civil and criminal law to build a sprawling federal database. She sued 29 states and the District of Columbia demanding data, litigating only against states that didn’t comply with her demands. Some 17 Republican-led states, like Texas and Nebraska, willingly turned over their citizens’ data.

Every state that opposed Dhillon’s scheme has succeeded to date, including California, Oregon, and Georgia.

‘Racking up losses at a pretty impressive rate’

Within hours of the ruling, Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore alerted a federal judge of the new precedent.

“The court held that DOJ failed to comply with Title III’s statutory requirements because its demand did not contain the requisite ‘statement of the basis,’ which must reflect its ‘foundation in fact,’ rather than a bare legal citation to Title III itself,” Amore’s counsel for the state told the court in a letter, referring to the Massachusetts order.

The Rhode Island litigation recently provided insight into the federal voter database that the Trump administration is trying to build.

In a hearing held in late March, the Trump Justice Department’s Voting Section Chief Eric Neff told the judge that the data would be stored safely, securely and in compliance with federal law.

“The United States is taking extra concern to make sure that we’re complying with the Privacy Act in every conceivable way,” Neff said on March 27.

As first reported by Wired, Neff submitted a “Notice of Clarification” the next day admitting that wasn’t true.

“To correct and clarify the record, preliminary internal data analysis of the non-public voter registration data has begun,” Neff wrote. “In particular, Civil Rights Division has begun the process of identifying and quantifying the number and type of duplicate and deceased registered voters in each state.”

That rang alarm bells for voting rights expert David Becker, who once worked for the same office before becoming the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“This is just the latest in a long string of missteps and misrepresentations or misunderstandings by this now hollowed out Justice Department, hollowed out voting section, which is racking up losses at a pretty impressive rate over the last fourteen or so months,” Becker told All Rise News in a video interview.

Becker called it “unfathomable” to either not understand or misrepresent basic questions about how the government is handling or using the data.

Drawing upon his seven years experience at the Voting Section, Becker called the federal government unequipped to conduct list maintenance to weed out dead and duplicate voter registrations.

“DOJ is not equipped to do this,” he said. “They can’t do it, and legally, they are prohibited from doing it, which is one of the big problems with all of these cases in the first place. And then you get this additional layer where the DOJ is also not taking care of this data, not using it appropriately, putting this data at risk, and is likely violating the Federal Privacy Act at the same time.”

‘Unprecedented and illegal’

The federal judge presiding over the Rhode Island case hasn’t yet responded to the government’s admissions that Neff’s claim about the handling of the data was false.

But the episode adds to the controversy surrounding Neff’s appointment.

Like Dhillon, Neff advanced the ideas of election deniers, and his brief tenure at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office ended in scandal, litigation, and a heavy judgment leaving taxpayers on the hook for millions.

In 2022, Neff prosecuted the CEO of the Michigan-based voting company Konnech, claiming the company stored sensitive data about California poll workers on Chinese servers. The Los Angeles Times found that the county’s case originated from a tip by True the Vote, one of the right-wing charities behind a series of failed lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election.

The county’s case collapsed, leading to a $5 million judgment for the company and an admission that Konnech’s CEO Eugene Yu was innocent.

Becker, the election expert, said that nobody with Neff’s black mark on his record would have been let near the Justice Department during his pre-Trump tenure.

“Normally, that would be a disqualifier for even applying to the Department of Justice,” Becker said. “Now, it appears it’s a prerequisite to applying for the Department of Justice.”

Becker doubts that the Trump Justice Department can do much with the data even if they won these cases.

“I don’t know that the DOJ actually has any intentions to use this data for any actual real purpose because they don’t have the expertise,” he said. “They’re losing every single case in court. They’re getting incomplete data.”

But Becker believes the data could be used as disinformation to “delegitimize future elections — particularly, with false claims that will be used in case the president’s party doesn’t do well.”

In one respect, echoes of the post-2020 election already started reverberating.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who tossed the California voter data lawsuit in January, slammed Dhillon’s nationwide blitz as “unprecedented and illegal.”

“The foundation upon which American democracy has been built is the right to vote,” Carter wrote in January. “Brave Americans have given their lives for more than two hundred years to protect this right. Now it seems the Executive Branch of the United States government wants to abridge the right of many Americans to cast their ballots. This is what this case is grounded in—the right to vote and the government’s obligation to protect that right.”

That urgency to Carter’s prose had a history.

In 2022, Carter became the first federal judge to find that Trump and his lawyer John Eastman’s election subversion efforts likely amounted to felonies, calling their actions a “coup in search of a legal theory.” Two of the crimes that Carter listed, conspiring to defraud the United States and obstructing a lawful proceeding, ultimately became statutes that former special counsel Jack Smith charged against Trump.

Watch the full interview with David Becker below on the All Rise News playlist of Legal AF.

Professor Jamie Rowen, a legal studies scholar at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, pointed out that the history began with a Cold War gambit that failed.

“So the idea really started after Richard Nixon decided to send bombers with nuclear warheads over to Russia to pressure Russia to give the United States what it wanted in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s,” Rowen said.

In what became known as “Operation Giant Lance,” Nixon sent the B-52 bombers in flight from Alaska toward the Soviet Union on Oct. 27, 1969, but he cancelled the exercises after finding they weren’t having the desired effect.

“Russia just said, ‘No, we don’t actually think they’re going to start a nuclear war over this,’ and so Nixon didn’t get what he wanted,” Rowen continued.

Flash forward to Tuesday.

After weeks of Trump’s escalating brinkmanship and threats of war crimes, the United States agreed to a two-week ceasefire agreement in which Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz and bombs continue to fly throughout the Gulf. Trump’s immediate statement in the wake of the agreement called Iran’s 10-point framework — a maximalist plan that would allow nuclear enrichment, abandonment of sanctions, and financial compensation — a “workable basis on which to negotiate.”

That was the same plan that Iran demanded well before Trump’s latest ultimatum.

Citing the research of political scientist Roseanne McManus, Rowen said that madman theory historically fares poorly when the adversary thinks the threats are coming from a leader who’s just crazy.

“If a leader is situationally acting like a madman, and they seem to just sort of have extreme preferences, then that might actually pressure an adversary to give in,” Rowen said. “But if the person seems to be dispositionally mad and seems to not understand the consequences of their actions, well, then the adversary is not going to give in.”

The reason for that, she noted, is “credibility.”

“You have to believe that they are actually going to do the thing they’re threatening to capitulate,” she added.

During a roughly half-hour conversation, Rowen sorts through the history and its application.

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On the same day that the Supreme Court cleared the Justice Department to dismiss Steve Bannon’s convictions, a federal judge rejected former Judge Hannah Dugan’s effort to overturn her felony conviction.

The two developments, falling within hours of each other, significantly advance Donald Trump’s use of the Justice Department to reward his friends, target his enemies and advance his political agenda.

Federal juries found that Bannon and Dugan both tried to stand in the way of different types of lawful proceedings.

‘All hell is going to break loose’

For Bannon, it was the investigation of the House Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Bannon had plenty of material information for congressional investigators. Before people even went to the polls on Election Day in 2020, Bannon predicted that Trump would falsely claim victory.

On his “War Room” podcast, Bannon stepped up the election subversion campaign in the days before the insurrection. He ratcheted up pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to illegally withhold certification of Joe Biden’s victory and announced on the eve of the riot: "all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”

It took time for Bannon’s defiance of the House Jan. 6th Committee’s subpoena to be rewarded.

After losing his D.C. Circuit appeal, Bannon fully served his four-month sentence, and Trump’s Justice Department moved to erase the convictions by retroactively dismissing his indictment. The Supreme Court’s decision hasn’t ended that process, only cleared the way for that outcome as the case returns to a lower court.

“The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for further consideration in light of the pending motion to dismiss the indictment,” the Supreme Court’s order states.

The Supreme Court declined to consider the Trump Justice Department’s invitation to consider the effect of Bannon’s claims of executive privilege or attacks on the legitimacy of the House Jan. 6th Committee. It’s unclear what discretion, if any, the D.C. Circuit has once the motion to dismiss Bannon’s indictment returns to the lower court.

In his criminal referral, Jan. 6th Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote that Bannon’s defiance hampered the investigation.

“If any witness so close to the events leading up to the January 6th attack could decline to provide information to the Select Committee, Congress would be severely hamstrung in its ability to exercise its constitutional powers with highly relevant information informing its choices,” the referral said. “Information in Mr. Bannon’s possession is essential to putting other witnesses’ testimony and productions into appropriate context and to ensuring the Select Committee can fully and expeditiously complete its work.”

Former federal prosecutor and I unpacked the development in a Substack Live earlier today.

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‘I tried to help that guy’

Contrast Bannon’s case with that of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Dugan, who was convicted last year of obstructing an immigration proceeding — namely, the administrative arrest of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a criminal defendant in her courthouse.

Just shy of a year ago, six federal agents showed up to Milwaukee County Circuit Court to arrest Flores-Ruiz, who was charged with domestic violence.

A federal jury found that Dugan had tried to obstruct Flores-Ruiz’s arrest by sending him and his attorney through a restricted hallway with two exits. The side door led to a stairwell leading out of the building, and the other door led to the hallway where the agents were waiting. Flores-Ruiz ultimately left through the hallway door, mere feet away from one of the agents, and he was safely arrested and deported. But an audio recording played for the jury suggested that wasn’t the plan.

A snippet of the audio captured Dugan saying “the side door.”

Judge Kristela Cervera, the government’s star witness, testified that Dugan told her she was “in the doghouse” with the chief judge because “I tried to help that guy,” apparently referring to Flores-Ruiz.

Throughout Dugan’s trial in December, there was little to no evidence that any “help” for Flores-Ruiz was personally motivated — and an avalanche of testimony and exhibits showing the upheaval that ICE enforcement inside courthouses wrought on the Milwaukee County Court system.

Milwaukee County’s Chief Judge Carl Ashley issued a press release warning that the policy could “significantly damage the integrity of the court system” by discouraging immigrants and marginalized groups from “attending court hearings, seeking legal assistance, or reporting crimes.” Ashley stood by that assessment in his courtroom testimony, and reams of internal emails showed judges struggling to navigate the legal boundaries of where and how ICE could execute arrests.

For the prosecution, none of those policy disagreements mattered.

“What happens when someone with the highest duty to uphold the law decides that it doesn’t apply to her?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Brown Watzka said during closing arguments in December. “It undermines the entire justice system.”

It’s an attractive statement of principle, and it clearly resonated with the jury. The Trump Justice Department’s conduct in the Bannon case shows that it only applies — strictly and severely — when the defendant is opposing rather than advancing Trump’s agenda.

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‘Temperament of an autocrat’

The verdict in Dugan’s case shows that jurors understood the case like much of the public did.

They believed that Dugan objected to the Trump administration’s policy of executing immigration arrests inside courthouses on a policy level, but their oaths as jurors didn’t allow them to consider that disagreement in determining whether she was guilty of the crime charged.

Dugan’s defense wasn’t one of civil disobedience. Her attorneys said that Dugan always intended to send Flores-Ruiz to the public hallway, where the agents were waiting.

Yes, Dugan disagreed strongly with a policy that complicated her job and made immigrant crime victims less likely to seek justice from the legal system. The evidence showed that she repeatedly and sharply questioned the limits of ICE’s power to execute arrests inside the courthouse. Her attorneys said that the confusion over that policy amounted to reasonable doubt, and prosecutors said that she simply didn’t like the answers.

That U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman rejected Dugan’s motion for a new trial or an acquittal was little surprise. It’s extremely difficult to overturn a jury’s verdict in post-trial motions, and Adelman previously ruled against Dugan on most of the central issues of her appeal, including immunity and the jury instructions.

As a jurist, Adelman has written openly about Trump’s threat to the rule of law in a Harvard Law & Policy Review article titled “The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy.” In the 2020 article, Adelman said that Trump has the “temperament of an autocrat,” leading the Seventh Circuit to rebuke him for the appearance of political rhetoric. Whether the experience made the judge cautious in his handling of Dugan’s case, Adelman could be safely assumed to be keenly aware of the danger of Trump’s attacks on the judiciary.

It remains to be seen whether Judge Adelman will have any more criticism of Trump’s authoritarian instincts during Dugan’s sentencing for her felony obstruction conviction, which carries a maximum five year penalty. Most legal experts doubt that she will receive that harsh a penalty, but the felony conviction likely ended her judicial career. She resigned earlier this year, and she continues to fight her conviction on appeal.

One thing is for certain: Dugan’s case isn’t the type of prosecution that the Trump Justice Department retroactively tries to torpedo following a conviction.

If the execution of the law is going to be impeded, an ally who does it to make hell break loose for Trump will get a pass. A judge who inconveniences immigration agents in order to maintain open access to her courtroom for everyone seeking justice will bear the full weight, force and burden of the law.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Dugan resigned earlier this year.