The Trump Justice Department’s abrupt withdrawal of subpoenas issued to New York Times reporters does not end the pressure on the prosecutors who brought it.

Hours after the hearing, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian ordered the government to provide “any internal communications” about the decision to seek a non-disclosure order concerning subpoenas for reporters for testimony about investigative journalism about the Qatar-gifted airplane that Donald Trump has been using for his Air Force One.

“With respect to the July 14, 2026 application for a non-disclosure order, the Government should, on or before Monday, July 27, 2026, furnish to the Court on an ex parte basis any internal communications on or before July 16, 2026, concerning (1) the decision to seek the non-disclosure order, (2) whether the application should or should not reference that the owners of the records were reporters, and (3) whether and when notification of the third-party subpoenas should be given to the reporters,” Subramanian wrote.

As the order indicates, the government failed to disclose in its application for a non-disclosure order that reporters held the records that they were seeking. The judge said during the hearing the government falsely claimed in its application that the grand jury investigation wasn’t public. (It was.)

During an interview with All Rise News, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s chief of advocacy Seth Stern noted that this is part of a pattern for the Trump Justice Department.

“This is certainly not the first time that the government has tried to hide the ball from the courts — [and] from subpoena recipients — when going after journalists,” Stern noted, citing the raid on Washington Post journalist Hannah Natanson’s home.

Prosecutors could still decide to try to subpoena information from Times reporters in the future, but any attempt would require the approval of Subramanian, who retains jurisdiction over the case..

Stern expects the worst in terms of the Trump administration’s intransigence.

“I don't think that prosecutors who refuse to harass the news media at Donald Trump's request are going to last long in this administration,” he said. “That's top of the agenda, harassing, intimidating, subpoenaing, raiding journalists.”

You can watch my interview in full on Legal AF’s All Rise News playlist, and paid subscribers can watch all of these videos ad-free below.

Read more

In his criminal referral letter, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) all but admitted that Smith told the truth, but he urged the Justice Department to prosecute him anyway.

Three words from Jordan’s criminal referral tipped his hand.

Subscribe or upgrade now!

‘Gave the impression’

The smoking-gun phrase appears in the middle of a sentence of a 6-page letter accusing Smith of giving misleading testimony about his prosecution team’s access to the text messages of Republican Congress members.

“The responses provided by Mr. Smith gave the impression that neither Mr. Smith nor his team had access to the content of members’ privileged text messages,” Jordan wrote, implicitly admitting the supposed evidence of a crime is the Committee’s subjective impression rather than any false statement.

From Smith’s marathon testimony, Jordan flags only two short snippets, adding up to roughly 20 seconds.

Here’s the first exchange.

Q. Did you seek a search warrant for the content of any text messages from Members?

A. From Members?

Q. Yes.

A. No, I don’t recall that.

Q. Okay. It was just toll records?

A. Correct.

There is no evidence that Smith sought a search warrant seeking text messages from Congress members.

Smith’s assistant Thomas Windom sought communications from senior White House officials from the National Archives and Records Administration, and those records included their text messages with Congress members.

Arguing that this was misleading, Jordan objects: “The Committee sought to understand, in particular, whether Mr. Smith, or members of his team, ever received or reviewed the content of Members’ communications.” That may have been the case, but those were not the questions Smith was asked.

The second snippet follows the same pattern:

Q. Did the toll records that you requested from the Senators, did they include the content of the phone calls?

A. No.

Q. Did the records that you requested, the toll records from the Member of Congress, include the content of text messages?

A. No.

In these questions, Smith was asked about his team subpoenaing toll records showing Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to push members of Congress to reject the certification of Joe Biden’s election immediately after the Jan. 6th insurrection. Those records included only metadata, not the content of the calls or text messages.

Share

‘Unimpeachably truthful’

The former special counsel’s lawyers Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski immediately picked up on the concession.

“Notably, the referral letter does not contest the truthfulness of Mr.Smith’s answers,” they wrote in a three-page response. “Perhaps in recognition of this deficiency, the referral letter instead relies on the unprecedented theory that Mr. Smith provided false testimony not because of what he said, but because of what he did not say.”

They note that this legal rationale isn’t merely wrong.

“This dangerous theory of criminal liability has no limiting principle and risks ensnaring every witness who testifies before a congressional committee who does not proactively disclose information that is not responsive to a question asked (i.e., every witness),” they wrote.

Smith’s lawyers said their client was “fully cognizant” that testifying was a legal risk.

“This risk existed not because Mr. Smith would make a false statement, but because President Trump has repeatedly ordered that Mr. Smith be prosecuted and jailed,” they wrote in their letter, which was addressed to Jordan and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “That is not the rule of law. And it contravenes the principles that are critical to the vitality of our democracy. An honest assessment of the facts and the law compels a rejection of this meritless referral.”

Ultimately, the Trump Justice Department indicted James Comey based on a similarly strained reading of the ex-FBI director’s congressional testimony. That case collapsed before the merits could be adjudicated.

But Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the House Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, said that a successful prosecution isn’t the point.

“It is meant to harass Jack Smith,” Raskin said. “It is meant to please their Fox News viewership. It is meant to whitewash their own participation in a scheme to overthrow our elections. And above all, it is meant to create a distraction so Republicans on Senate Judiciary can feel a little more comfortable confirming the architect of the Epstein cover-up and lawless Trump slush fund and super pardon, Todd Blanche, to the post of Attorney General. We will not fall for this ludicrous distraction. Neither will the American people.”

Watch my dissection of the problems with — and the concessions within — the criminal referral in the video at the top of this newsletter.

The government claimed that the subpoenas to reporters’ relatives were a “mistake.”

Immediately after the hearing, ’s Michael Popok and I discussed the brutal hearing for the government. Watch the archived video of that conversation at the top of this newsletter.

Read more about what happened on All Rise News here.

Subscribe or upgrade now!

Get more from All Rise News in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Under heavy pressure from a federal judge, prosecutors agreed on Thursday to unilaterally withdraw subpoenas issued to New York Times reporters.

The move followed sharp grilling about prosecutors’ actions to uncover the sources of the paper’s investigative reporting into vulnerabilities of the airplane the Qatari government gifted to Donald Trump. The government called the subpoenas to reporters’ family members a “mistake.”

U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian came in hot at the start of Thursday’s hearing, indicating the government failed the Second Circuit’s test in New York Times Co. v. Gonzales.

Subramanian gave prosecutors two options: Withdraw the subpoenas, or he would quash them.

“Is the government willing to withdraw the subpoenas?” he pressed.

After initially refusing to withdraw the subpoenas, prosecutors relented roughly an hour into the hearing.

‘Overwhelming evidence of bad faith’

In a two-part series of articles, the Times uncovered that the U.S. Secret Service forced Trump to fly out of the Turkish capital of Ankara with Air Force One, rather than the Qatar-gifted Boeing 747-8 with which he planned to depart. The plane lacked the defensive components necessary to protect Trump in a country bordering Iran.

Trump later said that the plane would be “maxed out” with upgrades to make it suitable for Air Force One — costing taxpayers up to $1 billion.

Within a week of publication, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton — Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence — signed subpoenas issued to six Times reporters behind those stories, one reporter’s mother, and two reporters’ spouses.

Attorney David O’Neil, who is representing the Times for the firm Debevoise & Plimpton, said that it was clear that the purpose had nothing to do with national security.

“The Government makes no effort to rebut — indeed it does not even acknowledge — the overwhelming evidence of bad faith, retaliatory animus, and harassment that pervades the record,” O’Neil wrote in a memo filed on the eve of the hearing.

Clayton’s senior counsel Sean Buckley claimed in an opposition brief that the “confidential grand jury investigation” implicated a “substantial national security concern.”

‘The last thing you do’

The Gonzales precedent that ultimately torpedoed the subpoenas is a ruling by the Second Circuit establishing a three-part test for issuing subpoenas to the news media, beginning with confirming that the information is “not obtainable from other sources.”

Subramanian noted that the government made no attempt to do that.

“Am I wrong that the regulations and cases like Gonzales say that subpoenas are not the first thing you do?” the judge asked Buckley. “They are the last thing you do.”

The Second Circuit is the federal appellate court with jurisdiction over the Southern District of New York, and it sits within the same complex of buildings.

Denouncing the subpoenas, the Freedom of the Press Foundation noted: “Even the Mafia says families are off limits.” Buckley said that prosecutors did not intend to involve the reporters’ relatives in the investigation.

“That was an error,” Buckley said. “It was a consequence of trying to move quickly.”

In a sworn application for a nondisclosure order dated July 14, a government official falsely claimed that the investigation wasn’t public and failed to disclose that the owners of the records that they were seeking were reporters.

After the government claimed that was an oversight, Subramanian invoked the possibility of considering sanctions “with respect to incorrect statements or misstatements.”

Prosecutors reconsidered their prior refusal to withdraw the subpoenas shortly after that. Subramanian made clear that he retains jurisdiction over any other matters related to the investigation and said that the government must present any attempt to renew those subpoenas to him before they are issued.

The judge requested briefing on the government’s “decision to seek a non-disclosure order,” “whether the application should or should not reference that the owners of the records were reporters,” and “whether and when notification of the third-party subpoenas should be given to the reporters.”

Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a video on social media announcing a policy to monitor the testosterone levels of troops aged 30 and older in pursuit of a “high-T” military.

“Our decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual warfighter,” Hegseth said in the video, stating that the program would correct “testosterone deficiency” for service members to operate at their “absolute best.”

On Wednesday, a federal judge asked a natural follow-up question: How does Hegseth square this prescription for gender-affirming care from the Pentagon with his ban on transgender troops?

Summarizing the policy, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes wrote: “Those with low testosterone will receive, on a voluntary basis, testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), which the Department of Defense describes as part of their ‘periodic health assessments.’”

Highlighting the disconnect with the Pentagon’s new policy, the judge noted: “The Military Ban states that ‘the Armed Forces must adhere to high mental and physical health standards...without the benefit of routine medical treatment or special provisions.’”

In March 2025, Judge Reyes issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s ban, pointing out that the government agreed that transgender troops have been serving honorably for years.

“Transgender persons have served openly since 2021, but Defendants have not analyzed their service,” Reyes wrote in a 79-page ruling at the time. “That is unfortunate. Plaintiffs’ service records alone are Exhibit A for the proposition that transgender persons can have the warrior ethos, physical and mental health, selflessness, honor, integrity, and discipline to ensure military excellence. Defendants agree. They agree that Plaintiffs are mentally and physically fit to serve, have ‘served honorably,’ and ‘have satisfied the rigorous standards’ demanded of them. [...] Plaintiffs, they acknowledge, have ‘made America safer.’ [...] So why discharge them and other decorated soldiers? Crickets from Defendants on this key question.”

An important point in her ruling, Reyes noted that the Justice Department provided no evidence of any downside to transgender enlistment. In fact, the government affirmed that “recruiting, unit cohesion, and military readiness have improved” since transgender people began serving openly.

The D.C. Circuit agreed that the policy was based on discrimination, not evidence.

“I conclude that the Hegseth policy is both arbitrary and based on animus,” U.S. Circuit Judge Robert L. Wilkins wrote for the majority in June, finding that the ban violated the “constitutional rights to equal protection of the law” for trans troops.

Although the appellate court narrowed the injunction to protect only the plaintiffs challenging the policy, Judge Reyes must now decide whether to vacate the ban entirely.

Hegseth’s announcement can add to the record justifying that action.

On Wednesday, Reyes ordered the government to address the “similarities and differences in administering TRT, both medically and logistically, for trans men compared to other service members.” She also demanded information concerning the “medical costs associated with screening for testosterone deficiency and providing TRT to service members who do not identify as trans,” along with the rationale for “treating trans men and other service members differently between this new policy and the military ban.”

Subscribe or upgrade now!

Special ed teacher vilified by Pam Bondi prevails

Earlier this year, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi posted a list of 16 Minnesota "rioters" and posted a selection of their mugshots, in apparent violation of Justice Department policy.

The first name on Bondi’s list was a special education teacher named Christina Rank, who was accused of ramming her car into a federal immigration agent.

Even though she’s a U.S. citizen, Rank was held inside an immigration detention center for nearly 12 hours and charged with assault under the same statute leveled at Jan. 6th rioters.

Some six months later, Rank finally beat the rap: On Tuesday, prosecutors dismissed Rank’s case after being forced to admit that there wasn’t probable cause of a crime.

“This dismissal is long overdue,” her attorney Bruce Nestor told All Rise News. “Federal agents intentionally collided with Ms. Rank’s vehicle and arrested her to retaliate against her for expressing verbal opposition to their presence on the property of the school where she worked. This case never should have been brought and Ms. Rank did nothing wrong to be put through this six month ordeal of a federal criminal prosecution.”

Rank’s case follows a pattern of top officials inside the Trump Justice Department pronouncing criminal defendants guilty of a crime on social media before the case ultimately collapses.

“I am on the ground in Minneapolis today,” Bondi wrote on Jan. 28. “Federal agents have arrested 16 Minnesota rioters for allegedly assaulting federal law enforcement — people who have been resisting and impeding our federal law enforcement agents.”

Declaring the defendants “rioters” without qualification, Bondi began the list with Rank’s name, and she followed it up with an assortment of mugshots of her co-defendants.

Under the heading “Concerns of Prejudice,” the Justice Manual lays out a clear prohibition.

“DOJ personnel should not encourage or assist news media in photographing or televising a person held in custody,” it states. “DOJ personnel should not voluntarily disclose a photograph of a defendant unless it serves a law enforcement function or unless the photograph is already part of the public record in the case.”

The Justice Department has violated this principle time and again, posting images of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), and others, and rhetorically convicting them before any trial. A judge dismissed Abrego’s case because of his vindictive prosecution, and a federal appeals court is considering McIver’s similar claims.

The collapse of Rank’s case once again illustrates the danger of that practice.

After a judge ordered the Justice Department to provide a bill of particulars — laying out the basis of Rank’s charges — federal prosecutors chose to dismiss the case.

“Upon a further review of the evidence and affidavit in support of the complaint, the government does not believe that probable cause for assault exists,” they wrote on Tuesday. “Based on a lack of probable cause and in the interest of justice, the government requests this case be dismissed with prejudice.”

A federal magistrate judge had called Bondi’s decision to post mugshots in the case “deeply disturbing.”

Read the motion to dismiss the case here.

Share

Ex-U.S. Attorney fired by Trump fights for his job

The man who served as the Seattle-based U.S. Attorney for 54 minutes before Donald Trump fired him filed a federal lawsuit to remain in his job.

Roger Rogoff, a former judge and local prosecutor, was selected for the role of Seattle’s top prosecutor by the judges of the Western District of Washington, earning the trust of jurists appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike.

But Trump fired him within less than an hour, insisting upon retaining Charles Neil Floyd, who was unable to receive Senate confirmation before his 120-day term expired.

In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Rogoff said that his firing violates the Constitution’s Appointments Clause and the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Rogoff’s firing by Trump during the first day of his Senate confirmation hearing last week, continuing his practice of insisting that unqualified Trump loyalists remain in U.S. Attorney positions unlawfully.

At least six Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys have been disqualified from their posts: among them, Floyd in the Western District of Washington; Alina Habba in the District of New Jersey; Lindsey Halligan in the Eastern District of Virginia; John Sarcone in the Northern District of New York; Sigal Chattah in the District of Nevada; and Bilal “Bill” Essayli in the Central District of California.

“As illustrated in districts across the country, those actions threaten the very harms that the Appointments Clause was intended to prevent, leaving the President (and all future Presidents) free to appoint whomever he chooses as de facto U.S. Attorney indefinitely, regardless of their qualifications for the role,” Rogoff’s 29-page complaint states.

Before Trump’s second term, the practice of the government insisting that unqualified loyalists serve as U.S. Attorneys without legal or constitutional authorization was virtually unprecedented.

Read Rogoff’s complaint here.

Programming Note

On Thursday, The New York Times will seek to quash the Trump Justice Department’s subpoenas to their reporters and their family members in federal court.

All Rise News will provide live coverage of that hearing, which is scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

From raiding Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home to prosecuting Don Lemon, the Trump Justice Department keeps obliterating new red lines for press freedom.

On Monday, the New York Times revealed the Justice Department’s new low: issuing subpoenas to reporters’ relatives.

“Even the Mafia says families are off limits,” Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation wrote in a statement. “It’s gross that the administration — in its never-ending effort to harass and intimidate reporters who reveal its incompetence — is going after the communications of journalists’ relatives.”

The Trump Justice Department issued its subpoenas in the wake of The New York Times reporting that Trump’s use of a Qatari-gifted Boeing 747-8 sparked security concerns that affected his air travel from Turkey earlier this month.

The Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who is Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, subpoenaed the reporters’ text messages and sought to compel their testimony before a grand jury. But the full scope of the Trump DOJ’s search only became apparent on Monday.

“The identifiers for which the Government seeks information include phone numbers used by one journalist's mother and two journalists' spouses,” Times attorney David A. O'Neil, from the firm Debevoise & Plimpton, disclosed in a letter. “The mother is a mental health professional with confidential client relationships. One of the two spouses is the general counsel of a major law firm.”

U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian paused the Justice Department’s subpoenas, pending a ruling on the Times motion to quash.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation noted the irony of the national security investigation.

“The Times’ reporting actually bolstered national security by ensuring that Trump and those who travel with him, including journalists, aren’t flying on an unsafe plane to serve the president’s personal vanity,” Stern wrote. “Trump’s hangers-on should be sending the Times thank-you cards, not subpoenas.”

“The circumstances exude the Department's bad-faith effort to intimidate the journalists and chill their ability to report on the Administration. Like the testimonial subpoenas, several of the phone provider subpoenas were issued immediately after the two articles were published, at the apparent behest of an enraged President and without first conducting any serious investigation; all of them issued within about a week of the publication of the articles.”

The judge scheduled a hearing on the matter to take place on Thursday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

All Rise News will cover the proceedings live from Manhattan Federal Court.

Read the letter from the Times here.

Subscribe or upgrade now!

Paramount-Warner Bros. merger blocked

A federal judge in California issued a temporary restraining order on Monday blocking Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros, halting the $110 billion deal pending antitrust litigation.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of a dozen state AGs that filed the lawsuit, hailed the “important victory.”

“This lawsuit is about a simple fact: when one company controls a massive share of our film and television industries, workers, artists, businesses, and consumers suffer,” James wrote in a statement. “Paramount’s unlawful merger with Warner Bros. would mean more expensive theater tickets, higher cable bills, fewer opportunities for workers, and fewer original stories shared with audiences across the country.”

In temporarily blocking the deal, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martînez-Olguín found that the attorneys general were likely to succeed on the merits, finding the states presented “compelling evidence that the combined firm resulting from the transaction will possess substantial market share in the wide-release theatrical distribution market.”

Shortly after the ruling, and I discussed the development during a live-stream for . You can watch our conversation on that and other topics below:

Share

Nationwide ICE protests planned

The 50501 Movement announced that more than 125 communities across the United States will hold vigils, protests, and demonstrations denouncing the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Johan Sebastian Guerrero and others shot to death by immigration agents.

Find listings of the events here.

Two days before Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing, a federal judge issued a blistering ruling scorching his actions concerning the so-called settlement in Trump v. Internal Revenue Service.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams ordered her clerk to send a copy of her order to the State Bar of New York, suggesting that the disciplinary authorities there may want to learn about Blanche’s conduct.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a former U.S. Attorney, immediately took notice and provided historical perspective.

“It's a hell of a decision in a matter that's been a hell of a saga for the Department of Justice,” Whitehouse told All Rise News in a video interview. “Our research is that the Department of Justice has never been accused of engaging in a fraud upon a federal court.”

In a roughly 20-minute interview, Whitehouse shared his thoughts and analysis in the lead-up to the confirmation hearing. He ultimately pressed Blanche to provide the Justice Department’s internal communications with Trump to the Committee. (Refusing to commit to do so, Blanche invited Whitehouse to place a request.) Whitehouse pointedly asked Blanche: “How long do you plan to put up with that Kash Patel character?”

Citing Patel’s “airplane jaunts,” Whitehouse continued: “Are you confident that he’s not drinking on the job? Are you sure that none of his travel is a pretext for vacation activities like snorkling, Olympics, and visiting girlfriends? Are you sure that he knows what he’s doing? Do you vouch for him? Are you willing to look into whether he lied to this Committee?”

After Blanche bristled at what he called the “extraordinarily obnoxious question,” Whitehouse countered: “Great, you get to own that.”

Perhaps most significantly, Whitehouse was one of the few senators on the Judiciary Committee providing a wide-angle picture of the defeats and dysfunction inside the Justice Department.

His staff prepared camera-ready graphics with montages of the judges’ most blistering rulings toward his prosecutors.

“If you look at the MAGA Department of Justice, over and over again, U.S. attorneys are being sanctioned and disciplined,” Whitehouse noted in the interview. “Cases are being dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecutors are being called out and lawyers are being called out for offering arguments that are ‘pretexts,’ which is a loaded word in judiciary land. Somebody says to a government lawyer — who enjoys the presumption of regularity — that he's making an argument in ‘bad faith’ or as a ‘pretext’: Them's fighting words, and that usually gets disciplinary attention. And it's happening over and over and over and over again. There's been an absolute avalanche of judicial criticism of this MAGA Department of Justice from judges appointed by every president.”

In other videos this week:

• A Florida professor and her attorney discuss their victory for academic freedom, blocking Gov. Ron DeSantis’s so-called “Stop WOKE Act.”

• Immigration expert reacts to ICE agents shooting men to death in Maine and Texas.

• Attorney Brendan Ballou discusses his latest lawsuit to block the $110 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. merger and testimony by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) that roasted Blanche for attending David Ellison’s dinner honoring Trump while he was seeking federal approval for the deal.

• In a solo video, I break down why a potential probe that Blanche signaled against former Special Counsel Jack Smith is based on a false premise.

You can watch my interview with Whitehouse in full on Legal AF’s All Rise News playlist, and paid subscribers can watch all of these videos ad-free below.

Subscribe or upgrade now!

Read more

As widely expected on Thursday night, Donald Trump stood behind a podium emblazoned with the presidential seal in the White House and revealed his latest wave of lies about the 2020 presidential election.

Just like six years ago, Trump’s lies immediately collapsed upon scrutiny. None of the documents that Trump declassified backed up his outlandish claims about China, Venezuela, noncitizens or any other scapegoat for his defeat. Journalists and experts quickly debunked his narratives, and representatives of his government also contradicted them.

But before picking apart the details of Trump’s latest deceptions, some critical context should be established at the outset.

Subscribe or upgrade now!

‘He knew’

As the evidence overwhelmingly shows, Trump knew and knows that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. He wasn’t merely wrong or deluded about the result.

Leaked audio showed Steve Bannon boasting before the election that Trump planned in advance to falsely claim victory even if he lost. Trump privately admitted to aides that he lost, and he buried reports that his campaign commissioned and paid for affirming that there was no fraud. That is to say, the Trump campaign paid two firms hundreds of thousands of dollars to find the election was rigged. Instead, they confirmed that Trump lost.

Trump’s election subversion indictment hinged on the premise that he conspired to defraud the United States, and it was fraud because it was based on knowing deceptions, not mistakes of fact.

“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won,” Special Counsel Jack Smith alleged in the indictment. “These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

Because of Trump’s re-election, a jury never rendered a verdict, but a grand jury found probable cause of a crime. A vast public record supports their judgment, including Trump’s statements, comments by those closest to him, and the information that was available to him.

“Crucially, not only was Mr. Trump’s voter-fraud narrative objectively false—he knew that it was false,” Smith wrote in his final report. “Mr. Trump’s false claims were repeatedly debunked, often directly to him by the very people best positioned to ascertain their truth. Campaign personnel told Mr. Trump his claims were unfounded; so did state officials, a White House official who engaged with Mr. Trump in his capacity as a candidate, and even his own running mate.”

Half a decade later, the same modus operandi is in place with a different but familiar rogues’ gallery.

Share

‘Zero evidence’

Almost immediately after Trump said that U.S. election systems are “vulnerable to being rigged,” one of his surrogates went sharply off-message in a taped interview outside the White House.

Disgraced journalist John Solomon, who is a member of Trump’s election task force, told MSNOW’s Vaughn Hillyard that the declassified documents showed “zero evidence” that a “foreign power flipped the vote in 2020, ’22, or ’24.”

Solomon also admitted that there’s no evidence that Venezuela tried to compromise U.S. voting machines, a conspiracy theory peddled by ex-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.

“No, the intelligence is very clear: They did it on their own machines,” Solomon said.

The concessions were remarkable in light of Solomon’s history. A key figure from Trump’s first impeachment, Solomon wrote a series of op-ed pieces in The Hill attacking then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was viewed as an obstacle in Trump’s effort to gin up a political investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. Solomon’s smear campaign contributed to Yovanovitch’s ouster, and The Hill criticized him for failing to disclose information about his sources before publication.

Since that time, Solomon has been mostly cast off from traditional news media and founded his own pro-Trump publication before landing his current White House position. Derek Harvey, who previously served as former Rep. Devin Nunes’ aide and tried to dig up dirt on the Bidens, is another figure linked to Trump’s Ukraine scandal on the task force. Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, who helped gin up mortgage fraud investigations against Trump’s enemies, is also reportedly involved in the declassification effort.

In his speech on Thursday night, Trump blamed the “deep state” for allegedly covering up and overlooking purported vulnerabilities in U.S. election systems during his first term. But Trump rehired John Ratcliffe, his former Intelligence Director from his first term, as CIA director for his second.

Ratcliffe released a careful and lengthy statement scrupulously avoiding any claim that the 2020 election was compromised by fraud.

Leave a comment

‘False manipulation narratives’

Trump’s declassified documents show that U.S. election systems are strong and resilient, not “broken” and “easily compromised” like he claimed.

One of the newly disclosed documents from the National Intelligence Council reinforces what election experts have long noted. U.S. election infrastructures are too diffuse of a patchwork of different states’ and municipalities’ systems and procedures for a foreign power to successfully attack.

“We assess that hostile actors could also manipulate systems that count or tabulate votes such as voting machines on a localized basis, but it probably would be difficult to coordinate a campaign to alter voting results on a wide scale,” the Council found. “Post-election audits and paper trails also most likely would uncover such efforts in nearly all U.S. states. Similarly, foreign actors would have difficulty coordinating a large-scale campaign to manipulate mail-in voting and robust postal tracking probably would detect any large-scale effort.”

The same document confirmed that the Russian government amplified conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Bidens.

“President Putin and senior Russian officials are overseeing efforts by proxies […] to spread claims about former Vice President Biden, as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 U.S. election,” the document states. “These claims include that when the former vice president was in office, he engaged in criminal activity in his dealings with Ukraine and individuals tied to Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, Derkach, Kilimnik, and other proxy actors.”

Although Trump scapegoated China, the Intelligence Community doubted that Beijing interfered with or tried to influence the 2020 election. Trump claimed that the “deep state” suppressed the truth from his presidential briefings and the public, but the dissenting view focused on social media posts and official statements, not attacks on voting systems.

Declassified intelligence about Venezuela shows the strength, not weaknesses, of voting machines. According to a CIA note, the Venezuelan government “developed sustained interest and likely some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems, including Smartmatic technology,” but there was no evidence that the regime “successfully” compromised those systems.

In an undated, unsigned memo, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security claims to have found more than 250,000 noncitizen voter registrations. But there is no allegation that a single fraudulent ballot was cast or any evidence that the number should be believed. Similar claims have crumbled under scrutiny.

By distorting what the documents show, Trump is perpetrating the same threat to U.S. election security that the Intelligence Community feared from foreign adversaries: “false manipulation narratives.”

“Adversaries could make wholly fabricated claims, such as announcing that they have compromised all U.S. voting machines, a claim that would be difficult and time-consuming—or impossible—for the U.S. government to disprove,” the Council found in January 2020.

Quoting that line, election expert Stephen Richer, a fellow from Harvard University’s Ash Center, told All Rise News in a video interview: “That's consistently what the president does.”

In 2020, Trump lied about election security in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy to remain in power. Six years later, Trump has recruited figures associated with his previous scandals in the lead-up to the midterm election. It’s become common for even Trump’s critics to play off his obsessive lies about the 2020 election as motivated by his vanity and delusion, but those critics ignore the patterns and the history at their peril.

Look out for a full video interview with Stephen Richer this weekend on Legal AF’s All Rise News playlist.

During a Substack Live conversation, Michael Popok and I took a cynical view of the outgoing Republican senator’s gambit.

On Wednesday, Tillis waxed indignant on what he called the “situational ethics” of the so-called weaponization of government, but he criticized the prosecutions of Donald Trump while staying silent on the numerous failed prosecutions of Trump’s enemies. Demanding a meeting without any further action smacked of a choreographed way for Tillis to justify a “yes” vote on Blanche, who already tried to signal some empathy for Epstein survivors without any promise of action, Popok and I agreed.

Meanwhile, Tillis’s willingness to try to discredit Trump’s criminal prosecution for 2020 election subversion particularly matters today. At 9 p.m. Eastern Time, Trump plans to deliver a speech that’s widely expected to float new conspiracies about the election results that year in Georgia.

During our conversation, Popok and I unpacked why Trump’s upcoming address is almost certain to be filled with disinformation. We profiled the key figures behind that campaign and shared highlights from both days of Blanche’s confirmation hearing.

Subscribe or upgrade now!

Get more from All Rise News in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

The standout line in the first day of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday was quickly corrected.

“I’m his lawyer,” Blanche said of his current and former boss Donald Trump, before cleaning up his statement by adding that he “was his lawyer.”

The slip came during friendly questioning by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who asked whether Trump was his friend.

Under oath, Blanche suddenly resisted that characterization of his relationship with Trump, a man to whom he previously declared: “I love you, sir.” Now that his subservience to Trump is a liability, Blanche suggested that he has a strictly professional attorney-client relationship: “I’m not sure there’s very many people who have had a criminal defense attorney who calls that person their friend.”

It was a telling, emblematic moment of a hearing, showing Blanche keenly aware of his reputation as the enforcer of Trump’s campaign of retribution, personal protection and government self-dealing, and strenuously avoiding even the most obvious concession.

Blanche falsely denied that he had the legal power to release Jeffrey Epstein-related case files in the Justice Department’s possession before Congress ordered their disclosure. A federal judge specifically told him otherwise in August 2025, well before the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

“The Government is the logical party to make comprehensive disclosure to the public of the Epstein Files,” U.S. District Judge Richard Berman wrote last year.

Earlier today, Allison Gill and I analyzed Day One of Blanche’s hearing, discussing effective questioning by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) about the Acting AG’s role in the $1.776 billion slush fund, the tax audit release order, and the purported settlement agreement justifying them both.

We also discussed our view of the shortcomings of questioning by other members of the committee, failing to provide the full breadth of the failures and dysfunction of the Trump Justice Department under Blanche’s watch. Check out the archived video of our live-streamed conversation here.

Here’s more analysis of the important moments and other news of the day below.

Subscribe or upgrade now!

The seeds of the next vendetta prosecution?

During an exchange with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who pumped his fist in solidarity with insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021, Blanche suggested that he would be open to criminally investigating former special counsel Jack Smith for alleged false statements under oath.

The premise of such a probe would be built upon a lie: Hawley claimed that Smith misled Congress by testifying that the telephone toll records that he subpoenaed pursuant to his Jan. 6-related investigation only contained metadata, not the content of the messages.

This was Smith’s testimony in question from December:

Q: The toll records that you requested from the Senators, did they include the content of the phone calls?

Smith: No.

Question: The records that you requested, [did] the toll records from the members of Congress, include the content of text messages?

Smith: No.

Smith’s testimony was accurate, and Hawley’s suggestion to the contrary relies on sleight of hand.

Earlier this week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) issued a press release stating that he discovered evidence that Smith’s prosecutors obtained text messages from 44 members of Congress, but the documents that Grassley posted revealed that those text messages were different records entirely from the information at the center of Smith’s questioning.

According to a Justice Department letter, Smith’s then-assistant Thomas Windom obtained the text messages by writing the general counsel for the National Archives and Records Administration. They were not records obtained via a subpoena. They weren’t toll records, and the requests sought the messages of White House officials, not the lawmakers with whom they communicated.

Blanche made clear that those pesky facts won’t prevent him from opening up an investigation.

“We take testimony in front of this body very seriously, yes,” Blanche replied, when asked whether he would consider probing Smith.

Share

Clayton: “I’m not an election denier.”

Playing out simultaneously with Blanche’s hearing, Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney turned Director of National Intelligence nominee Jay Clayton indignantly rejected that he is an “election denier” — while studiously refusing to admit without qualification that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential contest.

Adopting a familiar dodge, Clayton acknowledged only that Biden was “certified” the winner.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) wouldn’t let Clayton easily escape a straight answer.

“Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question — to have to indulge the president’s delusions?” Ossoff told Clayton.

As All Rise News previously reported, Clayton has become a regular fixture on CNBC, where he previously sowed baseless doubt on the recent California elections. Trump chose Clayton to lead the Southern District of New York, even though one of Clayton’s predecessor Geoffrey Berman called him an “unqualified” choice.

In another standout exchange, Clayton claimed that he only recently learned that former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard traveled to Fulton County, Ga., for the FBI’s raid and seizure of 2020 ballots. Ossoff roasted Clayton again about how his assertion “lacks credibility.”

Watch the exchanges here and here.

Leave a comment

Uncanny timing

As Blanche sought Senate confirmation, he demonstrated the Trump Justice Department’s contempt for the advice and consent process for U.S. Attorneys.

Some contextual background is in order.

Before Wednesday, federal judges have disqualified Trump-installed U.S. Attorneys in at least five states: New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Virginia and California, where the appointees failed to secure Senate approval or judicial support. The same pattern continued with a sixth top prosecutor on the morning of Blanche’s testimony — this time in Seattle, Wash., where the Trump administration fired Roger Rogoff, merely an hour after the judges appointed him as U.S. Attorney.

Blanche once again made clear that loyalists trump qualified candidates inside his Justice Department, posting the message below on social media.

It should be mentioned that such standoffs between the Justice Department and judicial branch over unqualified U.S. Attorneys were unprecedented before Trump’s second term. Now, they’re routine.

Thursday begins with the second day of Blanche’s confirmation hearing, and Trump is expected to make an announcement that evening, widely expected to consist of conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.

All Rise News will keep on top of both stories.

Federal agents shot and killed two men, days apart, in different parts of the United States within the span of a week. In both cases, the victims were fathers who were not the intended targets of the operation, and federal authorities accused them of trying to flee the scene, only to be contradicted by eyewitnesses.

On Tuesday, the death toll rose again in Florida.

This time, there wasn’t a shooting. During an “encounter” with federal immigration agents, a man fled into traffic and was struck by a tractor-trailer, according to state authorities.

Immigration expert Andrea Flores, who worked as an attorney for the White House and Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, emphasized that these are “preventable tragedies.”

“It keeps happening because this administration is doing something no prior administration has ever done, which is to treat every immigrant who is here with a civil immigration violation as a priority for arrest, detention, and removal,” she told All Rise News in a video interview.

Last week, the victim was father-of-three Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas. On Monday, it was 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, and both were approached by federal agents driving unmarked vehicles.

Despite a massive budget increase, ICE agents weren’t wearing body cameras during either incident.

“They got $7 billion last year. They have another set of billions of dollars more recently, and they can't put body cameras on their officers?” Flores noted. “Even worse, it seems to be the case in Maine that they may have had the cameras, but they weren't wearing them.”

Next to the site where Guerrero was slain, someone accurately wrote the words “THIS IS BLOOD” in white chalk, an image that MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow found all the more shocking in noting that it was a crime scene. Photographs and footage of the site showed the area was unprotected.

That sight drew attention to the federal government’s refusal to investigate similar incidents and cooperate with state authorities, which was cast into sharp relief on Monday when the Trump administration finally turned over Renée Good’s vehicle and other evidence to state authorities.

Her family’s attorney Antonio Romanucci called the transfer of evidence “an important and meaningful step towards justice and accountability.”

As All Rise News has reported, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty has brought multiple criminal cases against federal agents, and she has been leading a homicide investigation into Good’s killers.

Flores believes that the state of Minnesota more broadly has been invested in a “Truth and Reconciliation-type” reckoning into the federal occupation of the Twin Cities.

“I also think these incidents are building political pressure clearly on the [Trump] administration to act,” she noted. “They're seeing that these policies are one, horrifying and two, politically unpopular.”

In the wake of the latest killings, Reuters reported that ICE has temporarily halted vehicle stops.

But Flores is wary of the Department of Homeland Security’s “window dressing” of responsiveness under Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s leadership.

“Detention conditions aren't better,” she noted. “I'm not seeing any improvements in due process, and I'm seeing rampant racial profiling.”

Look out for the full interview later this week on .

Subscribe or upgrade now!

E. Jean Carroll: ‘The Eagle has landed’

Through her attorneys, E. Jean Carroll has received the $5 million verdict, plus interest, that a federal jury unanimously ordered Donald Trump to pay her for sexual abuse and defamation.

“The Eagle has landed,” Carroll celebrated on social media, shortly after the federal court database confirmed transfer of the judgment.

Interest grew with every day of nonpayment since the verdict, resulting in a $5,625,005.48 award on the day of the transfer.

Carroll is still owed more than $83 million from her second defamation judgment, which Trump is appealing separately.

Closing the book on Reza Zarrab

As previously reported on All Rise News, the criminal case of a record-breaking conspiracy to violate sanctions against Iran has been a thorn in Trump’s side for roughly a decade.

That’s because it implicated the Turkish government under the control of strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man described by Trump’s ex-National Security Advisor John Bolton as one of the “dictators he liked.”

During Trump’s first term, there were multiple reports that Trump tried to interfere with the money laundering case, but U.S. Attorneys resisted those efforts. Prosecutors ultimately convicted the scheme’s mastermind Reza Zarrab and a manager at Halkbank, a bank controlled by the Turkish government. Zarrab cooperated with the government and implicated Erdogan in sanctions-busting trades during bombshell testimony in 2017.

Then, Trump-tapped U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton suddenly dropped the case against Halkbank itself earlier this year.

On Tuesday, the saga reached its final chapter: Zarrab, the gold trader at the center of the scheme, was sentenced to time served and praised for his “valuable cooperation” with the U.S. government.

U.S. District Judge Richard Berman said that Zarrab, a once-globe trotting playboy married to a Turkish pop star, had been reduced to a “negative net worth” and faced threats against his life for becoming a state’s witness.

Read more about the history of the case here, along with coverage of Zarrab’s sentencing on the Organized Crime and Corrruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), where I contributed coverage from the courthouse.

Share

Programming note

Tomorrow, I will be joining Michael Popok on Legal AF to preview Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Watch it on YouTube at 8:45 a.m. Eastern Time here.

Also, check out my interview below with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) about Monday’s blistering ruling against Blanche.

A federal judge on Monday scorched a purported settlement that served as the basis of Donald Trump’s attempt to create a $1.776 billion slush fund for his political allies and immunize himself and his family from taxpayer audits.

In a 56-page order, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams excoriated Trump v. Internal Revenue Service as an “attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”

Affirming that Trump is “bound by the rules” of the court, Williams added: “Ensuring that our courts are used only for the express purpose created by the Constitution is the obligation of every judge and an obligation that this Court must discharge in light of the matter before it.”

She barred any of the parties to the lawsuit from “using, offering, admitting, or citing” the purported settlement in any “judicial, administrative, regulatory, arbitration, or any other official proceeding.”

Subscribe or upgrade now!

‘Such transitions do not absolve counsel’

In another portion of her ruling, Judge Williams laid down the hammer on multiple Trump-linked attorneys, two of whom now occupy senior leadership positions within the Justice Department.

Williams also referred Trump’s Florida-based personal lawyer Alejandro Brito to The Florida Bar for possible discipline. Brito has represented Trump in several defamation lawsuits against news organizations, including the BBC, ABC, and The New York Times.

She likewise ordered the clerk to forward a copy of her order to the State Bar of New York and the D.C. Bar, where she noted that “disciplinary proceedings are currently ongoing” against Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, respectively. She noted that Blanche and Woodward both had ties to Trump’s criminal cases. Woodward represented Trump’s co-defendant Walt Nauta in the Espionage Act case over the retention of highly classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and he also represented multiple witnesses in that case.

“While the Court appreciates that attorneys successfully transition between private practice and government service, such transitions do not absolve counsel of their ethical obligations,” Williams noted in her order.

Williams noted that Blanche’s and Woodward’s former clients stood to benefit from the purported settlement and the $1.776 billion fund it spawned.

“Indeed, these two cases have been referenced as quintessential Anti-Weaponization and Lawfare claims,” the order states. “Instead of either recusing because of their previous representations or vigorously defending this lawsuit as required to do so by DOJ, policies and procedures, these lawyers agreed to a ‘settlement’ involving a staggering amount of money potentially benefiting former clients.”

The New York Times reported that the now-voided IRS release order would have shielded Trump from more than $100 million in tax penalties.

Blanche’s confirmation hearing for attorney general is scheduled to take place on Wednesday and Thursday. The terms of the order would appear to suggest that Blanche will be barred from discussing the purported settlement during those proceedings.

Share

‘A vigorous, independent judiciary’

Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service earlier this year, purporting to seek damages for the disclosure of his tax returns.

During Trump’s first term, former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn — officially working for Booz Allen — leaked Trump’s tax information to the news media, along with those of hundreds of thousands of people, to shed light on the tax avoidance strategies of the wealthy.

Prosecuted by the Biden-era Justice Department, Littlejohn is currently serving a five-year prison sentence.

In fact, Judge Williams found, there was “no case or controversy” between Trump and the IRS because “one party controls the litigation.”

“Fidelity to the rule of law can be achieved only when the DOJ is free to assess the facts and governing law of each case it reviews without the stain of political interference,” she wrote.

Although the Trump Justice Department argued that it had the power to resolve all disputes, Judge Williams replied that this position answers the wrong question.

“Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court,” she wrote. “The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding. The answer is a resounding ‘no’: the Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest.”

She found that Trump and the federal government under his control advanced the lawsuit for an “improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.”

The judge’s inquiry began after 35 former federal judges filed an amicus brief asking her to reopen the case.

Inviting them to seek monetary sanctions, Williams applauded them for their service in a footnote: “Their thorough and well-reasoned scholarship, and uncompromising commitment to the rule of law—along with those of the organizations and lawyers referenced supra—are hallmarks of a vigorous, independent legal profession critical to sustaining a vigorous, independent judiciary.”

Read the ruling in full here.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has faced a groundswell of bipartisan opposition to his nomination in advance of his confirmation hearings next week.

On Tuesday, more than 1,200 former Justice Department officials — who served both Democratic and Republican administrations — signed a letter denouncing the “culture of fear” resulting from Blanche’s “purge of thousands of experienced career employees.” Trump’s former personal lawyer John Dowd and ex-White House attorney Ty Cobb signed that letter.

The week ended with an even larger show of force from 2,600 attorneys across the United States, who signed onto a blistering letter released on Friday condemning Blanche’s “conflicts” and “corruption” of the Justice Department.

But Blanche still has support in friendlier and more partisan waters.

Subscribe or upgrade now!

‘First and foremost — lawyers’

All Rise News has learned that the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) has been soliciting signatures from current and former members for a letter praising Blanche’s “integrity and tenacity” — and urging the leaders of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary to “confirm him without unnecessary delay.”

A former RNLA member who has previously participated in the organization’s events forwarded the call to action and related materials to All Rise News, condemning the “gross” partisan display.

“Regardless of political affiliation, the Republican National Lawyers Association is supposed to be — first and foremost — lawyers,” said the former member, who declined to be identified. “You don’t give up your oath of attorney that everybody swears to their individual state bar associations just because you want to help get specific candidates elected.”

Citing “legitimate ethical objections” to Blanche’s nomination, the former member said: “It just feels like the latest example of partisan politics infecting institutions that previously were viewed as sacred.”

The RNLA, whose website boasts more than 7,000 members, has not yet publicly released the letter or announced how many signatures the group gathered before its deadline lapsed on Thursday at 5 p.m. Eastern Time.

The group touted Blanche’s tenure as Donald Trump’s criminal defense attorney as an asset, rather than as a conflict.

“After departing from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mr. Blanche practiced as a defense attorney at two nationally respected firms before opening Blanche Law to represent President Trump in a number of matters in 2023 and 2024,” the embargoed letter states. “Those representations unfolded amid extraordinary public scrutiny and intense legal and political pressure.”

All Rise News did not receive the letter directly from the organization and did not agree to an embargo. The RNLA’s call to action states that its “letter will be submitted at [Blanche’s] forthcoming hearing.”

Share

‘Trump’s personal fixer with a federal badge’

Founded in 1985, the RNLA has counted Chief Justice John Roberts, former House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, and ex-White House Counsel Don McGahn among its former members. ProPublica reported that its third largest contributor for this year’s first quarter is the Dhillon Law Group, founded by Trump’s former election lawyer and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon.

Whereas the RNLA’s letter praised Blanche’s “America First law enforcement priorities,” the letter organized by the group Lawyers for Good Government identifies Blanche’s explicit adherence to Trump’s agenda as the problem distinguishing him from even his most partisan predecessors.

“While Attorneys General of both parties, including Jeff Sessions, William Barr, and Pamela Bondi, have affirmed before the Senate that the Department must operate free from political interference, Blanche has stated publicly that Americans should be ‘happy’ the president is ‘deeply involved’ in DOJ decisions, and dismissed White House independence from the DOJ as ‘the most false statement I have ever heard,’” the Lawyers for Good Government two-page letter states. “These positions are disqualifying.”

The more than 2,600 signatures from lawyers opposing Blanche’s confirmation stretch 126 additional pages.

Unlike the RNLA, Lawyers for Good Government regards Blanche’s representation of Trump in his criminal cases as a conflict and liability.

“No one in the history of the Justice Department has moved directly from representing a president in criminal proceedings to running the institution that prosecuted those cases,” the group’s founder and executive director Traci Feit Love said in a press release. “Todd Blanche isn’t America’s Attorney General. He is Donald Trump’s personal fixer with a federal badge. The Senate has a constitutional obligation to say no.”

According to Lawyers for Good Government’s press release, the signatories include “solo practitioners and partners at major firms, public defenders and former prosecutors, law school faculty and retired judges, civil rights lawyers and corporate counsel.”

The group intends to send a copy of the letter to every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee before Blanche’s confirmation hearing, which is scheduled to take place on July 15 and 16.

The RNLA’s president Michael Thielen didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

Earlier this afternoon, I stood outside federal court in Milwaukee following the sentencing of former Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan.

This newsletter delivered gavel-to-gavel coverage of her trial and sentencing thanks to your support, but the work is not done. Dugan’s attorneys announced their intention to appeal her obstruction conviction, and the broader issues of judicial independence in the United States remain just as resonant.

This archived video conversation of my live-stream with Michael Popok discusses some of those topics.

When then-Judge Dugan was first arrested, hundreds of people showed up for her at the courthouse to protest her charges. The federal government took the highly unusual step of perp-walking her, denigrating her in public statements before a trial and disseminating a photograph on social media of her accompanied by agents. In the words of her lead defense attorney, the Trump Justice Department tried to make her a “poster child” for judges defying ICE. Reporting live from Milwaukee shows how much powerful support she continues to have from the community.

Tonight, she also still has her freedom.

Popok and I also discussed a major development in the case of E. Jean Carroll: an order for her to finally receive her more than $5 million sexual abuse and defamation judgment. Donald Trump previously posted a bond to pursue his appeal, but now that he has lost, the ruling orders the court to release the money to her.

As I return to New York City, I will have more to report on both stories.

All the best,

Adam

Get more from All Rise News in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Former Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan received a non-jail sentence following her conviction for obstructing the arrest of an undocumented immigrant in her courthouse.

Commenting on what she described as “myths” surrounding the case, Dugan said: “I have been cast as a scofflaw and as a hero.” Rejecting those characterizations, she said: “I am a public servant who is just trying to do my job.”

U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman said of Dugan: “In short, this is a person who has done a lot of good in our community.”

Imposing a $5,500 fine, Adelman called Dugan an “otherwise good person” with “outstanding character” who made “a bad decision at the moment.”

Share

‘Poster child’

Late last year, a federal jury delivered a surprising mixed verdict, clearing Dugan of a misdemeanor charge of concealing undocumented immigrant Eduardo Flores-Ruiz — but convicting her of obstructing the same person’s arrest.

The Trump Justice Department handcuffed and perp-walked her into two courthouses. Then-Attorney General Pamela Bondi called her “deranged,” and FBI director Kash Patel posted a photograph of her humiliation on social media.

Dugan’s attorney Steven Biskupic noted that the government tried to make her a “poster child” for judges defying ICE.

“What judge in the country is looking at this case and saying, ‘Yes, sign me up’?” Biskupic said.

Breaking her silence on the case for the first time during her sentencing, Dugan said: “My acts were not done with any malicious intent or to advance any personal interest.”

A devout Catholic, Dugan added that she acted “ in accordance with the Scriptures and my judicial oath.”

Leave a comment

‘Passionate about the independence of the judiciary’

For many in Milwaukee County, Dugan’s trial became a reckoning on the Trump administration’s nationwide policy of ICE agents conducting arrests inside state, local and immigration courthouses. The jury heard testimony by the chief judge of her court that he feared the policy would chill immigrants from reporting crimes and accessing the system.

But First Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Frohling said the case wasn’t about whether the policy was “laudable, appropriate, or reprehensible.”

Two Marquette University Law School professors spoke on her behalf: Janine Geske and Greg O’Meara, who is also a Jesuit priest.

A former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, Geske said: “I know of no other judge in this state who’s more attached to this community.”

She urged Judge Adelman to give Dugan consideration for the “extraordinary life she led.”

“She’s passionate about the independence of the judiciary and the importance of the rule of law,” Geske said.

O’Meara said that Dugan turned away a more lucrative career path to “defend the disabled, the oppressed, and those discriminated against.”

This is a developing story. Check back later for updates on All Rise News.

More than 1,200 former U.S. Department of Justice officials urged the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to reject Todd Blanche’s nomination for U.S. Attorney General.

“The culture of fear Blanche has instilled within DOJ’s workforce must end,” they wrote in a two-page letter, appended with 57 pages of signatures. “Respect for career professionals must return. Would-be job applicants need to believe the Justice Department lives up to the virtue in its name. And instead of exhibiting fealty to the president, the Attorney General must heed John Adams’ admonition that our republic remains a ‘government of laws, not of men.’”

The DOJ alumni served in Democratic and Republican administrations.

At least two of the signers formerly represented Donald Trump or his White House. They include John Dowd, who served as Trump’s lead personal attorney during the Russia investigation, and former White House attorney Ty Cobb, who later became a prominent Trump critic.

, an advocacy group representing Justice Department alumni, sent the letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s leaders, Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Il.).

Blanche is scheduled to appear before that committee for a two-day hearing starting on July 15, a little more than a week from today.

Anticipating that the senators will hear about Blanche’s “corruptions,” “abuses,” “vindictive prosecutions,” and various scandals, the letter cites “the deals designed to reward lawbreakers with taxpayer dollars; the erasure of accountability for January 6; the mishandling of the Epstein files; and the denigration of judges and repeated violations of their orders.”

But the letter takes a sharper focus on Blanche’s “degradation of DOJ’s apolitical career workforce.”

Of more than 100,000 Justice Department employees, roughly 16,000 have left during Blanche’s leadership, according to the letter.

Justice Connection’s executive director and founder Stacey Young said that Blanche “has shown time and again that his guiding star is fealty to the President, not the Constitution.”

“That fealty led to the purge of thousands of experienced career employees, a loss that will have a generational impact on the Justice Department’s ability to carry out its mission and maintain credibility with the courts and the American people,” Young said in a statement.

The letter marks the latest mobilization by the legal community during Donald Trump’s second term in ways that appear to be unprecedented, if not previously unimaginable.

• In May, 35 former federal judges signed an amicus brief that sparked an investigation into whether the Justice Department engaged in a “fraud on the court” by creating a $1.776 billion slush fund as a purported settlement of Trump v. Internal Revenue Service.

• Roughly 350 former judges signed an amicus brief supporting major law firms Trump targeted for retribution, and more than 175 former judges criticized the Supreme Court’s reliance on so-called emergency docket orders, saying that their unexplained holdings are “not binding” on lower courts.

• In dramatic demonstrations, lawyers have gathered in front of courthouses to reaffirm their oaths to the Constitution, and a group of sitting and former judges started a four-day bus tour throughout the Rust Belt today, going into communities in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan to defend an independent judiciary.

As the eye-watering number of signatures in the latest letter shows, the groundswell of opposition is growing.

The letter is worth reading in full here.

Share

Court spikes DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act”

The Florida law backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that restricts speech at universities is a “breathtaking assertion of power” that violates the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

“Though the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint, puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them,” U.S. Circuit Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee, wrote. “Forcing an official government line — in a college classroom of all places—is exactly the ‘pall of orthodoxy’ that the First Amendment will not tolerate.”

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s preliminary injunction blocking higher education provisions of Florida’s so-called “Individual Freedom” law, touted by its supporters as the “Stop WOKE Act.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free-speech group, brought the lawsuit challenging the law on behalf of University of South Florida professor Adriana Novoa, student Sam Rechek and others.

“As a professor, I shouldn’t have to choose between teaching to the best of my ability or facing punishment,” Novoa said in a statement. “This decision is such a relief to professors who care about their students and want them to become well-rounded and informed. It will allow me and countless other professors to teach our classes without government interference.”

As described in the majority opinion, the statute rested on the unconstitutional notion that the state government that pays a professor’s salary has total control over her speech.

“That is not a blessed union,” Grant wrote, in an impassioned opinion. “Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth. This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”

U.S. Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa, another Trump appointee who was previously a DeSantis-appointed Florida Supreme Court Justice, wrote the dissent.

Read the opinions here.

The right to troll the VP

“This petty cat account exists purr-ly to troll the administration & have more followers than J.D. Vance.”

So reads a post on the 1.9 million-follower Instagram account of Massachusetts resident Amanda McGonigle, whose “CatsOnACouch” handle lampoons the vice president’s infamous “childless cat ladies” comment. Her viral posts were apparently too hot for the U.S. Secret Service, whose agents allegedly identified her by name before blocking her from attending Vance’s public appearances.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday arguing that this conduct constitutes unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

In one incident in Bangor, Maine, armed Secret Service officers singled her out and said “we know where you stand,” according to the 24-page complaint.

First flagged by reporter Seamus Hughes, the complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maine.

Clearly having fun with the assignment, the ACLU of Maine touted: “Our Latest Claw-suit to Purr-tect the First Amendment.”

Read the complaint here.

Judge quashes election-related subpoena

Finally, a federal judge in Georgia on Tuesday quashed a “staggering” subpoena stemming from Donald Trump’s ongoing attempts to discredit his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II, a Trump appointee, slammed the Justice Department’s “fishing expedition” to compromise the privacy of thousands of election workers and volunteers.

In a 28-page opinion, the judge notes that the statute of limitations has lapsed on any possible crime.

“The DOJ essentially asks the Court to turn a blind eye to the DOJ’s investigation of nonspecific allegations and/or crimes which have no possibility of a conviction,” he wrote. “In essence, the DOJ’s argument is that it would be proper for a grand jury to investigate a time-barred crime, indict a defendant or defendants, and allow pretrial procedures to begin, when the conclusion is inevitable—the statute of limitations on the relevant crimes has run. Therefore, the DOJ asks the Court to use its already scarce judicial resources on what would be a dead-end prosecution. The Court is not convinced that it must ignore the clear existence of a time bar against any hypothetical crimes.”

Fulton County challenged the subpoena, warning about the “chilling effect” that disclosing the personally identifying information of thousands of election workers would have.

Ray noted that the county’s fears weren’t “hypothetical or unfounded.”

“Those who work to run elections (particularly those who volunteered their time during the COVID-19 pandemic) should be valued and are necessary for successful elections in Fulton County going forward,” he wrote. “Allowing the DOJ to obtain by subpoena the Fulton County volunteers and workers’ personal information, given its inability to prosecute anyone due to the time lapse, would be unreasonable and place a heavy burden on Fulton County that cannot be ignored.”

Read the order here.

Reminder: The sentencing of former Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is scheduled to take place at 11:30 a.m. Central Time on Wednesday. Stay tuned to All Rise News for live coverage from the courtroom.

In the wake of the birthright citizenship decision, the Trump administration’s misinformation and vilification campaign against the judiciary has taken on an apocalyptic tone.

Trump’s extremist senior advisor Stephen Miller declared that the Supreme Court had ordered the nation to “destroy itself.”

The claim, of course, is ludicrous: By a 5-4 margin, the justices upheld an understanding of the 14th Amendment that had been in place since its ratification more than 150 years ago, but they more generally affirmed a fundamental character of the nation since its founding. Chief Justice John Roberts illustrated in his majority opinion how the country inherited birthright citizenship from the English common law, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson emphasized how formerly enslaved people drew from that tradition in advocating for Reconstruction-era amendments to rebuild a “shattered empire” after the Civil War through a “Second Founding.” Jackson showed how the nearly successful attempt to change the fundamental character of the country hinged upon the “distortion of historical facts.”

Hysterical as Miller’s reaction to the Trump v. Barbara decision was, it paled in comparison to his rhetoric against district court judges more generally. Miller has accused federal judges of participating in a “judicial coup” of the government and labeled them “radical left.” He’s ratcheted up his demonization during a historic surge of threats against judges.

Ultimately, however, Donald Trump and Miller’s disinformation campaigns against an independent judiciary are hardly news. The judges’ response to these campaigns is.

‘An extraordinary march’

On Tuesday, sitting and retired judges from around the country respond to escalating attacks on the judiciary with a dramatic gesture to instill trust: They will be boarding a bus in western Pennsylvania and spend the next four days traveling through the Rust Belt, starting with the Keystone State before moving on to Ohio and Michigan to interact directly with communities.

The participants include a diverse spectrum of local, state, and federal judges, along with prominent attorneys. The Michigan Supreme Court’s sitting Chief Justice Megan Cavanagh and the Ohio Supreme Court’s retired Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor will be joining the tour, as will two former federal judges. O’Connor, an elected Republican and the first woman to hold her position, was vilified by her party for casting the deciding vote to invalidate a partisan GOP gerrymander.

O’Connor has company: She’s traveling with her dog, Giancarlo Cappuccino.

Other participants, including former Third Circuit Judge Timothy K. Lewis and former North Carolina Supreme Court Judge Bob D. Orr, have vocally criticized Trump’s attacks on the judiciary.

Organized by the Keep Our Republic and Democracy Rising Collaborative, the groups’ co-founders Steve Silverman and Daniel Miller told All Rise News that defending judicial independence is nonpartisan and patriotic.

“This is happening a couple days after our 250th birthday,” Miller noted in a phone interview. “Some people are viewing this time with a measure of hopelessness, pain and despair. But I think it’s also an opportunity for us to reclaim the values upon which this nation was founded — and the values upon which this country still stands for — and to celebrate those values.”

The tour also has a global resonance: The bus drive is inspired by Poland’s Tour de Konstytucja.

“We were in Warsaw, Poland in October with the Carter Center, and there we learned about the Polish judges and their heroism,” Silverman explained. “They did an extraordinary march through the city of Warsaw in their robes, which was an incredible moment of coming down out of their courtrooms and engaging in the community and marching. And they were joined by hundreds and thousands of other people, including judges from all over Eastern Europe, Central Europe and Western Europe.”

The European tour first launched in 2021, when Poland’s ruling party had been dismantling judicial independence. Judges there traveled around in a Volkswagen Microbus, demystifying a judiciary to people in towns and villages. Poland experienced a remarkable democratic resurgence years later, and the judicial tour remains a regular summer event in that country.

In the U.S. and Poland, Miller said that having judges visit local communities helps illustrate how the rule of law is a “kitchen-table issue.”

“It really does matter every day in your life,” Miller told All Rise News. “When you go to the bank and your money’s there, that’s the rule of law. If you get hit by a car and you have recompense, an ability to make yourself whole, that’s the rule of law.”

Since this newsletter’s launch, All Rise News has charted how judges have been adapting and responding to attacks on the U.S. judiciary.

Months after Trump’s inauguration, attorneys across the United States renewed their oaths to the Constitution in front of courthouses for Law Day, an occasion that lawyers had traditionally marked — if at all — in banquet halls rather than the streets. The organizers of that event explained that they took that “unprecedented” step because they can “no longer stand idly by as judicial independence and the rule of law are systematically taken apart.”

The group Speak Up for Justice has been hosting regular events highlighting threats against judges. Increasingly, judges have become victims of so-called “pizza doxxing,” receiving deliveries at their home addresses to communicate that the sender knows where they live. Often, the deliveries are sent in the name of Daniel Anderl, the murdered son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas.

As reported by ABC News, the U.S. Marshals Service recorded 564 threats against judges last year, and 241 threats were logged as of only March of this year.

Look out for more information about the dates, times, and locations of “Justice in Motion” events on its website.

Uncanny timing

Through an accident of fate, the “Justice in Motion” tour happens to overlap with Wednesday’s sentencing of former Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, who faces possible imprisonment following her conviction late last year for obstructing the arrest of an undocumented immigrant.

In April 2025, Dugan’s arrest alarmed the legal community, inspiring condemnations from bar associations and legal groups from coast to coast.

The Trump Justice Department worked to maximize the sense of shock, subjecting Dugan to a highly unusual perp-walk where the FBI paraded her shackled into the courthouse. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi called Dugan “deranged,” and FBI director Kash Patel posted a photograph of her on his social media account, long in advance of a trial.

Dugan’s attorney Stephen Biskupic said that the highly unusual spectacle forced Dugan to live the “life of a recluse,” and her conviction forced her to resign her judgeship.

Whatever sentence U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman imposes will be read as sending a message. The charge of Dugan’s conviction carries a maximum 5-year sentence, but prosecutors calculated the sentencing guidelines between 15 and 22 months imprisonment. So far without elaboration, the Trump Justice Department requested a “serious” penalty.

“Anything less risks sending the opposite message — that personal loyalties, subjective viewpoints, or self-interest can supersede legal duty,” prosecutors wrote.

Dugan’s attorneys seek a sentence of time served, and her defenders say that she’s suffered enough, being forced to resign from a job that she loved.

“For her, it was an extraordinarily deep price to pay,” Milwaukee’s hugely popular former mayor Tom Barrett, who was a character witness at her trial, was quoted telling the court in her sentencing memo.

Dugan also enjoys broad public support in the legal community for taking what many applauded as a principled stand against the federal government’s intrusion into state and local judiciaries.

Throughout the debate over her prosecution, a critical voice has been understandably silent: Dugan’s, and she intends to speak about her actions for the first time at her sentencing.

Until now, Dugan’s defense has been at odds with the popular understanding of the case. Her defense team never portrayed her actions as civil disobedience, an argument that likely would have been barred as an impermissible attempt at jury nullification. Instead, Dugan’s lawyers argued at her trial that she never tried to prevent the arrest of undocumented immigrant Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a defendant in her courtroom. Yes, Dugan admitted that she had serious qualms with and criticisms of the Trump administration’s policy of ICE arrests in courthouses. Most of the judges inside the Milwaukee County Circuit Court System shared those concerns, but Dugan argued that she simply tried to navigate the complicated legal landscape arising from that policy, not violate a federal law she personally opposed.

When Dugan finally speaks, the stakes will be high. Prosecutors have argued for a stiff sentence, in part, because of her “lack of remorse,” but any admissions that she makes could be used against her during her inevitable appeal. She also will be speaking for a legal community anxious about preserving judicial independence and in keeping with her personal conscience. Dugan’s sentencing memo describes her as a devout Catholic who “followed the Gospel message of serving others less fortunate.”

All Rise News plans to attend the proceedings in Milwaukee for the same reason this newsletter thoroughly covered her trial. Her story and sentence could profoundly shape the balance of power between the Trump administration and the state and local judges operating independently from the federal government.

Stay tuned for coverage of the sentencing hearing, which begins at 11:30 a.m. Central Time on Wednesday.

This past term, the Supreme Court left up to 1.3 million lawfully present immigrants — who fled war, disasters, and civil unrest, followed all the rules and went through the heavy vetting of the Temporary Protected Status program — vulnerable to the designs of Donald Trump.

A slim majority upheld the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of birthright citizenship, potentially inspiring a Lost Cause movement that is one justice away from upending the constitutional “right to have rights.”

Border authorities have the high court’s blessing to physically block the tired, poor and huddled asylum seekers from physically setting foot on U.S. soil.

It’s clear that the Supreme Court has been, at best, an inconsistent check on Trump’s extreme immigration agenda, but the recent collapse of one of his cruelest programs shows the judiciary isn’t the only restraint in his constitutional order.

Thanks to organizing, civic engagement, and investigative journalism, the administration’s $1 billion ambition to create an archipelago of ICE warehouses collapsed last month.

Project Salt Box’s co-founder Michael Wriston, who played no small role in lighting a fire under a nationwide movement against it, recounted his “stunned disbelief” upon learning about reports that the Trump administration effectively dropped plans for seven of the warehouses.

“I could not imagine that day would come, but here we are,” Wriston told All Rise News in an interview.

In June, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration plans to “sharply scale back” its warehouses, which have been blocked by federal judges and resisted by communities in red and blue states.

Throughout that time, kept the public informed about where they were being built, how they would affect the environments, what the government spent on them using taxpayer money, and how they were being litigated against and opposed. It is not hyperbole to say that the group helped spark an enormous and successful nationwide movement.

Wriston says its work is not done.

“They’re still seeking detention space, just not nearly in the numbers that they were previously, and so, we’re going to keep watching them,” he said. “We, the people, are going to keep an eye out.”

The victory makes him optimistic but not complacent.

“Beyond this July 4th, and beyond this administration, democracy is constantly under threat so long as we let those forces continue to have a foothold,” he said. “We’re not out of the woods, yet. So continue to build those community bonds. Continue to be strong. Show up. Protest. File FOIA requests. Write letters. Whatever it is you bring to the fight, do it because it is a winning fight so long as you stay engaged.”

In other interviews this week:

• Court Accountability’s Lisa Graves and I reflect on the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara.

• Election expert David Becker celebrates another narrow Supreme Court victory defending mail-in voting.

• Law professor Jed Shugerman reacts to being cited by Justice Sonia Sotomayor about how the Slaughter decision handed Trump a power beyond that of an English king.

Free subscribers can watch the interview with Wriston on YouTube here — and 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.

Happy 4th!

Read more