The public face of the effort is Los Angeles-based prosecutor Bill Essayli, a former MAGA state politician who was disqualified from serving as U.S. Attorney last year because he failed to attain Senate confirmation.

Essayli remained in his office anyway by adopting the title “First Assistant” to the vacant U.S. Attorney seat, but he is likely to be ousted from that position in the wake of a recent Ninth Circuit ruling, which disqualified his fellow Trump-loyalist prosecutor Sigal Chattah under nearly identical circumstances.

With the legitimacy of his own position in doubt, Essayli has been aggressively peddling the Trump administration’s election fraud claims on TV, social media and right-wing podcasts. He insists that the 28 cases brought by prosecutors vindicated the administration’s voter fraud claims.

Los Angeles reporters quickly poked holes in that narrative: Seven of the defendants never cast a ballot and were accused of illegal voter registration. Poring over registration records, the publication LA Material found that the supposed poster child of noncitizen voting, a 72-year-old man named Omar Muñoz, is a registered Republican.

Reporting live from the courthouse, The Los Angeles Times spoke to Mr. Muñoz and his family and painted a disturbing portrait of his arrest:

“Muñoz, who declined to comment on the charges against him, said he’d been up to have coffee early that morning when he heard the commotion outside. Agents said if he didn’t open the door, they’d break it down.

He described seeing helicopters, at least eight cars and several agents from different agencies descending on his home, and recalled thinking, “What movie am I in?”

“That’s a lot of money. Taxpayers paying for that,” he said. “They could have sent me a letter saying report to the court.”

Muñoz — who said he came to the U.S. legally in 1975 and has “paid all my taxes” since — said he explained to the arresting agents that he’d had six surgeries recently and they “didn’t care.” He said he didn’t learn about the charges against him until four hours later.”

Muñoz’s wife described the scene as overkill for her injured, septuagenarian husband accused of a nonviolent offense.

“Seriously? All these people just to come for an elderly person,” she recounted telling a federal agent, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It’s unbelievable.”

He wasn’t alone: Ana Domínguez, a 60-year-old from El Salvador, showed off the bruises on her wrists to reporters concerning her arrest, and she said that she didn’t remember registering to vote in July 2006, as her charges allege. It’s undisputed that she never voted in the decades since.

She and other defendants profiled by the Los Angeles Times deny the accusations.

Watch a video breakdown about why questions concerning Essayli’s legitimacy matter on the full All Rise News playlist on Legal AF here.

Paid subscribers can watch the videos ad-free below.

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After The New York Times reported that she stood to gain $50 million from a Venezuelan billionaire eager to obtain a pardon from Donald Trump, newlywed attorney Alina Habba Mildon denigrated the story as “just another October surprise.”

This year, there’s been no shortage of them.

Earlier in the month…

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Days after being handed a nearly 20,000-name list of “likely” noncitizens, California authorities ran the numbers and found some startling results.

In Los Angeles County, Assistant Registrar-Recorder Aman Bhullar sampled 200 names on the list from within that jurisdiction and found that nearly 39 percent of them were born in the United States.

That doesn’…

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Hours before an evidentiary hearing in the East Potomac Golf Course case, Judge Ana Reyes emphatically rejected the Trump Justice Department’s demand that she recuse herself.

“That is a serious charge,” she wrote, referring to claims of alleged bias. “The Court answers it. W…

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By all accounts from the courtroom, the presiding federal judge was yelling.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes was livid that the Trump administration cut down hundreds of trees along the East Potomac Golf Course, despite promising to preserve the grounds and provide ample notice before making any alterations pending the litigation.

“I was hearing from everyone on plaintiff’s side that this was going to happen,” she told the Justice Department. “I said repeatedly, ‘No, I trust the government.’ I trusted you all not to do precisely what you have done. What has happened has cost the government all of its credibility.”

Rather than reacting with contrition, the Trump Justice Department attacked the judge for the way that she expressed her outrage.

Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, the second highest official in the Department, sent out a post with an image of Donald Trump glaring at the judge. There was a caption on the image: “ROBES UNRAVELED,” and McCotter suggested that she didn’t have a judicial “temperament.”

McCotter must have known what it meant to put a federal judge on blast.

U.S. Marshals Service statistics show that there were 562 threats against federal judges in the last fiscal year, and Judge Reyes publicly disclosed that she became one of the targets after she ruled against Trump.

In 2019, Judge Reyes blocked Trump from revoking Temporary Protected Status against Haitian immigrants in a decision later overturned along partisan lines by the Supreme Court. The death threats poured in following the decisions, including calls to shoot and lynch her. She disclosed one chilling message that she received by email: “I hope you lose your life by lunchtime, you worthless whore.”

The Trump Justice Department has not finished attacking her: On Friday, the government filed a motion seeking her disqualification, accusing her of “histrionics,” and asking her to publicly release audio from the hearing.

“Judge Reyes’s behavior in this case is nothing short of egregious,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the Department’s third highest official and a lawyer who represented Trump’s co-defendant Walt Nauta in the classified documents case, wrote in the motion. “And her misconduct in other high-profile litigation involving the Trump Administration only confirms that she cannot serve as an impartial arbiter of the issues in this case.”

During Trump’s first term, when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Trump infamously exploded: “Where is my Roy Cohn?” The Trump mentor, a mob lawyer and chief counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, taught him how to antagonize and counterpunch himself out of any situation, including a Fair Housing Act lawsuit accusing the Trump family of excluding Black people from their properties. Following Cohn’s advice, Trump countersued the federal government, launched a public relations blitz, and ultimately applied enough pressure to secure a sweetheart settlement without an admission of guilt.

In his second term, Trump has stacked the Justice Department with personal Roy Cohns following the same playbook. Led by his personal lawyers, the Department has responded to adverse rulings by judges with tactics far stronger than appeals. The Trump Justice Department sued the entire District of Maryland bench and filed misconduct complaints against nearly every judge on the District of Minnesota bench. (That first case collapsed, and the latter action remains pending.)

These actions alone targeted 22 judges, and they do not include other high-profile judicial attacks: Trump Justice Department filed a quickly dismissed misconduct complaint against Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg and sought the recusal of at least three other federal judges. That’s not counting the scores of other judges subjected to threats, harassment, and intimidation because Trump and his former personal attorneys leading the Department verbally attacked them online or in press conferences.

Despite the Trump Justice Department’s well-established modus operandi of judicial intimidation, Judge Reyes professed her trust in the government, and she is learning how it is repaying that grace.

Dozens of her peers already have come to the conclusion that the government does not deserve that trust. Federal judges found that the government violated court orders in at least 31 lawsuits in the first 15 months of Trump’s second term, according to the Associated Press. ProPublica found at least 40 instances where judges found that the government lost the presumption of regularity.

That’s why legal commentator Matt Ford made this connection in The New Republic: “Trump’s War on Trees Is a War on the Republic.” The article drew a straight line between felling trees and toppling pillars of the rule of law.

“The Trump administration may find all of these concerns to be tedious and pointless. They may simply regard federal public property as Trump’s personal property, as if he had acquired the United States itself in a leveraged buyout on election night in 2024. Trumpworld may tire of liberal judges and lawmakers standing in the way of Trump carrying out what they regard as the sovereign will of the American people. They would be mistaken to think this way. The American constitutional order grew over the course of centuries, watered by generations who hoped its canopy would cover future generations, as well. Trump’s allies can hack at its roots today, but they will miss its shade tomorrow.”

On Monday, Judge Reyes will hold an evidentiary hearing to investigate the felling of the trees, but the hearing will be about much more than that. The proceedings will also represent a reckoning on the Trump administration’s repeated axe strikes at the trunks of an independent judiciary in the United States.

She has invited the general public to listen to the hearing remotely.

All Rise News will cover the proceedings.

To support this work — provided in detailed, unflinching and appropriate context — please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you haven’t done so already. Most of the content of this newsletter is free, but a small number of paywalled features helps to keep this work running. One of them is a regular listing of upcoming court hearings, protests and opportunities for civic engagement.

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To put it mildly, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is no stranger to scandal.

Over the course of his 23-year-long tenures in elected office, Paxton faced a federal criminal investigation, state securities fraud prosecution, an impeachment by a GOP-controlled House of Representatives and acrimonious divorce proceedings. Somehow, the Trump ally and 2020 election denier survived politically to tell the tale.

Now that polls constantly show Paxton trailing his Democratic opponent, The Wall Street Journal dropped what may have been the final hammer.

Nearly two years ago on New Year's Eve, Paxton partied in Dubai with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife, and they have footage of the bash.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

“As fireworks exploded over the Burj Khalifa skyscraper to welcome 2025, Paxton and his girlfriend Tracy Duhon watched from a luxury high-rise balcony full of people, according to a video of the gathering viewed by The Wall Street Journal, details of which were contained in court filings and confirmed by people familiar with the matter.

Among those at the event with Texas’ top law-enforcement official were two Americans who had been indicted months before on federal healthcare-fraud charges but failed to return to the U.S., Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, according to the court records and people familiar with the matter. Ahmed, a healthcare executive, had donated $190,000 to Paxton, campaign-finance records show, including $25,000 days after he was indicted.”

The New Year’s bash of yore is now haunting Paxton’s attempt to rise to the U.S. Senate during an especially precarious part of his campaign.

According to polling averages, his Democratic opponent James Talarico holds a little more than a three-point lead in the final stages of the race, and that margin is practically unheard-of for a race of its kind. Talarico is fighting to become the first member of his party to win a statewide office since 1994.

Will Paxton's latest scandal finally strip off the Teflon from his career and contribute to an upcoming political earthquake in the Lone Star State?

Watch the full video here, and catch up on the full All Rise News playlist on Legal AF here.

Paid subscribers can watch the videos ad-free below.

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They’re calling it a “MAGA blood feud.”

That’s a phrase being used to describe the fight that has broken out between Alina Habba and Ric Grenell, according to explosive reporting by Axios.

According to the reporting, Habba claimed that her new husband, Turkish billionaire Turhan Mildon, tried to donate nearly $6 million dollars to the Kennedy Center through Grenell, who was then the president of the organization. But Grenell allegedly never deposited the money. Grenell denies this, calling the allegations “absurd.”

On the second day of the controversy, The Daily Mail poured more fuel on the fire, reporting that Donald Trump placed a furious phone call to Grenell from the White House about the missing millions and Mildon’s lawyers delivered evidence to White House lawyers to support her claims.

The story of geopolitical intrigue and wheeling-dealing could bubble up in the litigation to protect the Kennedy Center, as a congresswoman pursued information about the institution’s finances.

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The romance behind the feud

Like many blood feuds, this one begins with a love story: the whirlwind romance between Habba and Turhan Mildon, a Turkish construction billionaire who has been described as a “close friend” of dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

(Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton once described Erdogan as one of the “dictators he liked.”)

Notwithstanding their ties to their countries’ strongman leaders, Habba and Mildon come from different backgrounds, different countries, and even different generations. She’s 42. He’s 29. They’re both divorcées, and they met at the Kennedy Center.

Within less than a year, Habba and Mildon married at a multimillion dollar reception at the Waldorf Astoria hotel attended by prominent MAGA figures like Sebastian Gorka who published photographs of the newlyweds on social media. According to public reporting, Mildon has a history of dating or marrying politically connected women, but he says that his marriage to Habba is for love.

At the Kennedy Center, Mildon also found a business opportunity — which is where Grenell comes into the story. The men shared geopolitical interests. Grenell had been urging the Trump administration at the time to take a softer approach to Venezuela’s strongman ruler Nicolas Maduro, and Mildon had business in Venezuela.

According to Axios, Habba gave the White House this account of Grenell’s proposal: In the spring of 2025, Grenell tried to urge Mildon to include a donation to the Kennedy Center in a business deal involving a U.S. company.

The report doesn’t include any details about the nature of the deal or the identity of the company. Habba originally told the White House that her husband was asked to pay $17.6 million, but she said that she later learned from her husband that it was actually $5.6 million.

If Grenell and Mildon hoped to normalize relations with Maduro, their vision hit reality with the snatch-and-grab operation that toppled the Venezuelan leader and whisked him to the United States for criminal prosecution.

The New York Times reported earlier this week that Maduro’s successor Delcy Rodriguez initiated an audit and cut Mildon’s cement plant contracts.

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Following the money

The development could spill into court through a lawsuit filed by Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), who has been challenging Trump’s plan to close the Kennedy Center for two years for a $250 million taxpayer-paid renovation.

The Trump-installed Kennedy Center board claims that the project will need to be supplemented by additional fundraising.

The missing millions could undermine their arguments.

For example, Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have repeatedly argued that the Kennedy Center was on the brink of financial ruin and structural collapse.

“It’s had decades of financial neglect,” Lutnick said of the Kennedy Center outside of federal court during an August hearing. “And the reason that happened is because Congress is good at a lot of things, but what they’re not good at is putting out a little bit of money every year to renovate and restore a building.”

Despite depicting himself as the Kennedy Center’s financial savior, Trump’s plan to remake the institution in his own image has been ruinous. The Washington Post reported that ticket sales plummeted by half the week after Trump became chairman of the board, as audience members and artists fled in droves. The Board has claimed that fundraising for repairs hinges upon honoring Trump on the building, but Rep. Beatty defeated those plans twice as illegal.

Congress, the judge made clear, demanded that the building only honor Kennedy.

Beatty’s lawyers have called Trump’s two-year closure plan a “smokescreen” to mask the board’s financial mismanagement, and the missing millions could help them advance that argument.

The congresswoman’s attorney Nathaniel Zelinsky said at a recent hearing that the Board’s thinking may have been: “We’re shutting this thing down to hide our own embarrassment.”

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper has allowed the congresswoman to seek discovery into the Kennedy Center’s finances, and the discovery deadline is set for Oct. 23.

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Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia has had a rough couple of first days in office, but it could get much worse than a disastrous and widely ridiculed debut press briefing.

Zacharia now faces the possibility of a state bar investigation into whether she has been inappropriately or illegally holding herself out to be a lawyer.

On Wednesday, the Campaign for Accountability’s executive director Michelle Kuppersmith urged the state bar of California to look into her credentials and if warranted, refer the case for criminal prosecution.

“Ms. Zacharia now speaks for the President of the United States from the White House podium. She has relied on her legal pedigree to give her credibility in that role and to her statements as a television legal commentator,” Kuppersmith wrote in a letter on Wednesday. “The public is entitled to rely on the representation that a person who calls herself a lawyer is in fact licensed to practice law.”

Kuppersmith said that she also sent a letter to California’s Ventura County District Attorney’s Office.

‘Very, very strange’

Independent journalist of the publication Popular Information first reported that there is no evidence that Zacharia is licensed to practice law in any of the 50 states or Washington, D.C.

California law states that “any person advertising or holding himself or herself out as practicing or entitled to practice law or otherwise practicing law who is not an active member of the State Bar, or otherwise authorized pursuant to statute or court rule to practice law in this state at the time of doing so, is guilty of a misdemeanor.”

Zacharia has a juris doctor from Pepperdine University School of Law, but there reportedly isn’t any record of her passing a bar exam or receiving any type of credential in the United States.

Pressed on the subject by the White House press pool during her first day on the job, Zacharia appeared to suggest that she was credentialed in China, working as an associate in Beijing.

The Campaign for Accountability said that isn’t any explanation at all.

“Published reporting indicates, however, that China does not permit foreign nationals to sit for its national bar examination or to practice Chinese law,” the group’s letter states. “In any event, admission in a foreign jurisdiction would not authorize Ms. Zacharia to practice law in California or to hold herself out as entitled to do so here.”

Kuppersmith noted that Zacharia appeared unprepared for the question.

“It’s just all very, very strange,” Kuppersmith told All Rise News. “Clearly, she was not prepared to answer the question, despite everything, having known that there was a real storm around this. And I don’t know what you think your job is as a press secretary, but it’s to be prepared to answer questions, notwithstanding your own personal history when it’s become the news story itself.”

Zacharia’s LinkedIn page states that she worked as a “general counsel” at the nonprofit group Fix California, and she reportedly said that she served as an “outside counsel” for the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

‘Might be competing with Anthony Scaramucci’

The Campaign for Accountability has kept busy during Trump’s second term, filing bar complaints against seven Trump administration officials today.

Those include Attorney General Todd Blanche, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr and disqualified U.S. Attorneys like Lindsey Halligan from the Eastern District of Virginia and John Sarcone from the Northern District of New York.

“Obviously, she can’t be disbarred if she’s not barred,” Kuppersmith noted, adding that Zacharia could face fines or other penalties to stop her from engaging in “this dangerous behavior ever again.”

Blanche has tried to stop bar complaints from being filed against Trump Justice Department officials, suing the D.C. Bar to stop disciplinary probes of Jeffrey Clark and Ed Martin. He also proposed a regulation to give the DOJ a “right” to review disciplinary complaints in the first instance.

If the California state bar agrees to investigate, a probe could take years — as was the case for Trump ally and so-called “coup memo” author John Eastman, who helped devise the plans for election subversion.

Any investigation could outlet Zacharia’s tenure, especially considering how it started.

“We don’t really know if Katie Zacharia is long for the Trump administration,” Kuppersmith said. “She might be competing with Anthony Scaramucci for the shortest tenure. But, you know, we shall see.”

Watch the full video of the interview below and read the bar complaint here.

Also in tonight’s newsletter:

• A federal judge interrogates the Trump administration’s excuses for running taxpayer-paid ads after her order to cancel them.

• Legal ethics experts demand a Hatch Act investigation into the search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home.

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“Simply put, that was viewpoint discrimination,” U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, found in a 26-page opinion.

The Trump administration already appealed the ruling and has been looking for any loopholes around his order, which didn’t explicitly bar disinviting certain news outlets from Air Force One and similar restricted spaces.

During a 20-minute conversation on Substack Live, Glenn Kirschner and I called attention to a little discussed aspect of the ruling.

The Trump administration’s claim that the news outlets endangered national security largely hinged upon a declaration by Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson, whose history of extreme statements and sympathies were the subject of a Mother Jones investigation. She has spoken of her belief in the Great Replacement theory that immigrants are being lured to replace the white population. She has supported the German far-right party, AfD; and she rejected the historical consensus concerning the case of Leo Frank, a Jewish man whose lynching on false murder charges catalyzed the movement in the United States against antisemitism.

Worse, she’s not the only Trump administration figure with extremist views connected to the case.

Justice Department attorney Michael Velchik made headlines for his praise of “Mein Kampf” as a Harvard student and having written an essay from Adolf Hitler’s perspective.

In the video, Glenn Kirshner and I explain why that matters — and why Trump’s new White House press secretary may be off to a rockier start than people think.

Read the ruling in full here.

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Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle resigned as U.S. Ambassador to Greece on Tuesday in the wake of reporting that she asked a Trump donor to pay off her $100,000 credit card debt in return for favors.

White House press secretary Katie Zacharia announced during her widely panned debut briefing on Tuesday: “We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign.”

After the announcement, Guilfoyle confirmed on social media that her tenure would be “coming to an end.”

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“Strong predication”

The announcement fell days after bombshell reporting in the Wall Street Journal that Guilfoyle pushed a Trump donor to wire $100,000 to her personal American Express account. The donor, Eric Deters, had wanted help with personal tax and legal issues, according to the Journal.

The Journal published a series of embarrassing text messages backing up its account, showing Guilfoyle apparently badgering Deters for the money days before her confirmation hearing by writing, “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” Other messages showed Guilfoyle’s apparent discomfort with Deters leaving a paper trail, fretting at one point, “What a nightmare[!] you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship[.] stop writing.” (Guilfoyle disputed their authenticity through her attorney Jesse Binnall, a 2020 election denier who represented Trump’s campaign in Nevada.)

In an interview, former public corruption prosecutor Perry Carbone told All Rise News that reporting of this nature would typically spark a criminal investigation.

“Assuming the authenticity or an accuracy of the reporting here, this is very powerful and strong predication, and in normal times, this would warrant a pretty quick opening of an investigation and all the steps that go along with it, including witness interviews, search warrants, and subpoenas, applications under the Stored Communications Act,” Carbone said in a video interview last week.

More damaging revelations followed the original Journal investigation: Three days later, the Journal reported that Guilfoyle boasted about two Greek tycoons paying for her private jet travel around the world while she was at Davos.

That article was based in part on an audio recording reviewed by the Murdoch-owned newspaper.

Separately, CBS News reported that Deters called Guilfoyle’s request for $100,000 a “quid pro quo” for help with an Internal Revenue Service probe of his tax deductions and outreach to the Trump Justice Department to seek the extradition of an accused healthcare fraudster his clients were trying to sue.

Guilfoyle added this note of defiance to her resignation: “I will not allow false accusations to define my decades of public service.”

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‘Powerful, compelling evidence’

Carbone, a former federal prosecutor, said that the revealed facts call for an investigation into “first and foremost, a bribery or an attempted bribery or bribe receiving scheme.”

He added that the federal bribery statute covers people named to be a public official, including nominees for public office.

Guilfoyle’s repeated text messages expressing anxiety about what Deters put in writing could become “very powerful, compelling evidence” of “consciousness of guilt,” the former prosecutor said.

“It's evidence that the person wants to conduct the transaction in the dark of night, so that the public doesn't see it and that no one else sees it,” Carbone told All Rise news.

When the White House announced the request for Guilfoyle’s resignation, newly minted Press Secretary Zacharia called Guilfoyle a “wonderful asset to the team,” and there have been no whispers of any potential criminal consequence.

Carbone said that an investigation would have been a given during his tenure as a prosecutor.

“In normal times, this is something that would be dealt with quite swiftly,” Carbone said.

The Justice Department declined to comment on whether an investigation has been opened.

“The Department does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations, or the lack thereof,” a press office wrote in an unsigned email.

Asked about the belief that Guilfoyle’s ties to the Trump family will insulate her from a criminal investigation — or make her a candidate for a perspective pardon — Carbone said: “The message that it conveys to the public is that all people are not treated equally or fairly, and that’s, in my judgment, the entire purpose and mission of the Justice Department.”

Carbone’s full interview with All Rise News will be published later today. Visit this page later to watch it in full.

In documenting the ongoing assault on press freedom, it’s easy to get distracted by the Donald Trump show.

This discourse views Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico through the lens of his grievances and hostilities toward those news organizations, media personalities or the so-called “fake news” writ large.

But Trump’s attacks on U.S. media have always been multifaceted and systematic, involving a mix of regulatory pressure, revocation of access, meritless defamation lawsuits, intimidation and prosecution. Allies like Larry Ellison receive the carrot of media consolidation approval, and perceived adversaries like Media Matters and Don Lemon get the stick of targeting by captured federal agencies. FCC attack dog Brendan Carr turns comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel into proxies to antagonize and pressure their respective networks, and federal authorities repeatedly raid the homes of reporters for national newspapers.

In each of these examples, the news cycle is dominated by Trump’s grievances or friendly relationship with the relevant media property, icon, or story he wanted to suppress. But the focus on Trump’s latest moods, insults or targets obscures the bigger picture: He wants to systematically pressure, shape, intimidate, and influence the news media in the United States.

The next chapter

On Saturday, The New York Times revealed the next chapter of Trump’s attempted media intimidation: an investigation into whether ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox’s decision to suspend White House press pool coverage in protest to the ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico violated antitrust law.

It’s not so much a legal theory as a cudgel seemingly dreamed up from the fever swamps of the MAGA right — in particular, right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s chief of advocacy Seth Stern called that theory “nonsense.”

“Trump may view the presidency as a business venture, but news outlets’ standing up for their constitutional rights has nothing to do with antitrust law, no matter what Laura Loomer says,” Stern said in a statement.

Weeks ago, Loomer, an influencer with no legal background, floated the idea of that White House press pool boycott constituted an antitrust violation. She also absurdly suggested that the alleged violation wasn’t being enforced because a “Democrat named Stanley Woodward” leads the DOJ’s antitrust division.

Woodward, the third top figure in the Trump Justice Department, is hardly a liberal Trojan Horse inside MAGA’s fortress. He represented Trump’s main co-defendant in the classified documents case: Trump’s so-called “body man” Walt Nauta — along with several other key witnesses like Kash Patel, ex-Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich, and then-Mar-a-Lago IT manager Yuscil Taveras in the grand jury investigation. Trump’s political action committees compensated Woodward handsomely for his efforts, paying him at least $1.4 million between 2021 and 2024, according to public filings.

It hasn’t been confirmed that Loomer’s pressure led to the antitrust investigation, but this conspiracy theorist’s influence over Trump has become so well-established that it’s entered the political lexicon. A Trump ally who has been fired, ousted or politically damaged because of an attack by this right-wing influencer has been “Loomer-ed.”

Former federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, who led the team that brought Ghislaine Maxwell to justice, said in a federal lawsuit that this happened to her.

‘Telling the press how much he missed them’

Palace intrigue aside, the Freedom of the Press Foundation explained why Loomer’s legal theory is bunk.

“Depriving Trump of the attention he craves is not a competitive harm and in any case, antitrust law has long recognized First Amendment exceptions even when there is anticompetitive impact,” Stern said. “Even more bizarre than the administration’s legal theory is that after all his ‘fake news’ rhetoric, Trump is weaponizing the DOJ to pressure the networks he calls the ‘enemy of the people’ to stay at the White House. It’s a weird way of telling the press how much he missed them.”

Whether or not Loomer sparked the investigation, The New York Times confirmed that Woodward is pursuing it, and the Trump Justice Department’s spokesperson cited the Sherman Act as a basis.

The news media, rightly, viewed the boycott as basic solidarity.

Major broadcasters from every political background, from ABC to Fox, pulled the plug on the White House press pool because they recognized that giving any U.S. president the power to ban one of their peers could backfire on them once the political winds shift.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico already obtained a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump White House from revoking their credentials, and Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly is likely to extend it into a preliminary injunction before Tuesday. Those legal victories, however, can only go so far.

Even after the media coalition’s initial victory, Trump continues to restrict press access where court orders don’t specifically prohibit him from doing so. This is what makes media solidarity so dangerous to Trump. A federal judge’s rulings can be scrutinized by an army of lawyers for loopholes.

A free press working together to fight censorship, on the other hand, cannot be Loomer-ed.

All Rise News previews the week ahead in the courts and civic engagement in the listings below.

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For the first time in more than two decades, the United States has refused to invite international election observers from Europe to observe the upcoming midterm elections.

The Trump administration’s decision puts the United States in the company of Russia and Belarus, the only two other countries to have refused to admit observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OCME), whose Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) is widely viewed as the “gold standard” in election observations.

The development, first reported in the United States this week by MS NOW, otherwise received little attention domestically, but it’s being viewed globally as part of the Trump administration’s global attack on international institutions that the country once led.

“The U.S. is just disengaging from the entire system of democratic support and human rights monitoring in the world,” Princeton University professor Kim Lane Scheppele, a leading scholar of democratic backsliding and resurgence, told All Rise News in a video interview.

ODIHR election monitors have been monitoring U.S. federal elections continuously since 2002, and its director Maria Telalian expressed her “regret” at being disinvited from observing the midterms.

“Election observation is not a judgment on a country or its institutions. It provides voters, election administrators, contestants and the wider public with an independent and objective assessment of the electoral process,” Telalian wrote in a statement.

In an extended interview for the All Rise News playlist on , Professor Scheppele discussed how the United States became a “standard setter” on election observation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. She predicted that the Trump administration’s snub would call attention to reports most U.S. citizens never read and likely take for granted — including their findings that contradict Trump’s favored election myths and lies.

For example, ODIHR’s report on the last presidential elections praised the security of U.S. elections while debunking false claims of voter fraud in its executive summary.

“The campaign was marked by disinformation and instances of violence, including harsh and intolerant language against women and immigrants by one candidate,” the November 2024 report said. “Repeated unfounded claims about election fraud negatively impacted the public trust. Substantial efforts were undertaken to ensure election integrity and security, and election officials conducted their duties professionally despite numerous threats against them.”

Citing those findings, Scheppele noted that European election monitors “called out the fake claims of fraud. and the disinformation and the violence directed against election officials.”

“So, that’s where American elections were going before now, and I think the Trump administration — whoever it is that looked at this report — said we don’t want that report again,” she added.

Watch the full video interview below.

On Thursday morning, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly held a hearing to determine whether to grant a preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s ban of the media coalition. Judge Kelly, a Trump appointee, previously granted a temporary restraining order reinstating the credentials of the banned reporters.

During a Substack Live, and I discussed why the judge is likely to rule in favor of press freedom once again. The initial ruling fell on Fifth Amendment due process grounds, and the Trump White House has provided shape-shifting explanations for why press credentials were revoked. Then, the White House press office invented a post-hoc administrative process to challenge revocation decisions, which the media outlets described as a “sham.” Judge Kelly extended his existing TRO by two business days, and he indicated that he would issue a ruling by Tuesday.

In the video at the top of this newsletter, we discussed the arguments made by the media coalition’s lawyer Ted Boutrous, the Trump Justice Department’s “Mein Kampf”-praising attorney Michael Velchik, and the administration’s reliance on increasingly strained invocations of national security. We also unpacked the significance of a decision unsealing the more than 160-page report outlining the plan for the Kennedy Center’s two-year closure for a $250 million renovation.

Watch the full video at the top of this newsletter.

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The Kennedy Center’s Trump-installed Board cannot hide a 163-page report providing the details of its plan to close the building for two years to complete a more than $250 million renovation, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.

It’s the latest in a string of victories by Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), whose lawsuit succeeded in blocking Donald Trump’s effort to rename the Kennedy Center and put his name on the building.

The Board has relied upon the still-secret JLL Plan, written by the real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle, to justify closing the Kennedy Center for more than two years to complete renovations — but opposed its public release on the grounds of unspecified safety and security concerns.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said that he would allow the Board to propose redactions “out of an abundance of caution.”

“The vast majority of the JLL Plan appears to contain information that is non-sensitive or already publicly available,” the 6-page order states. “The Court makes clear that any redactions proposed by Defendants ‘must be narrowly tailored and specifically supported.’”

The Board must propose the redactions one week from today, and the Congresswoman will respond by Oct. 19.

Judge Cooper will ultimately decide what, if any, information will be redacted from the report. The judge also ordered the wholesale unsealing of a four-page Powerpoint presentation outlining the proposed renovations.

Rep. Beatty said that the unsealing of the report is in the public interest and crucial to her opposition to the two-year closure of the Kennedy Center.

“This is a case of enormous public interest about public officials’ maintenance of a public memorial to a slain President,” her lead attorney Nathaniel Zelinsky wrote last month in the motion to unseal.

The Kennedy Center’s Board claims that the building is closed on a temporary basis for “emergency repairs” after a 5-by-4-ft. stretch of plaster fell from the Grand Foyer in September — in an order that continues to be reviewed on a “weekly basis.” To date, the purportedly temporary closure has been extended every week.

The Board claims that the current closure is separate from the plan for a two-year closure for renovations, which is under review by the court.

Earlier this week, Rep. Beatty told Judge Cooper that the Kennedy Center’s Board was stonewalling all communications with Trump, who asserted presidential communications privilege over the evidence. Trump is the first sitting U.S. president to simultaneously serve as the chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board. He became “Chairman Trump” after installing loyalists to give him control over the institution.

Watch a video breakdown of “Chairman Trump” here.

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Former Olympian David Hearn’s attorneys have demanded that two inspectors general investigate his “nightmare” prosecution.

Hearn’s requests to Justice Department and Interior Department watchdogs fall less than a week after a federal judge permanently dismissed his felony indictment to prevent the federal government from reviving a “meritless, politically driven prosecution.”

In a statement released by Democracy Defenders Fund, Hearn’s attorneys Michael Bromwich, Steve Levin, Norm Eisen, and Mary Dohrmann demand a reckoning.

“The Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior subjected an innocent man to a nightmare of wrongful arrest, felony indictment, and public defamation to cover up their own botched, rushed renovation of the Reflecting Pool,” they wrote in a statement. “This administration threw the entire weight of the federal government into prosecuting Davey Hearn, and their actions surrounding his arrest and indictment demand full accountability.”

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‘Test of the IG system’

At the same time, Hearn’s attorneys are under no illusions about the current state of once-independent watchdogs.

“We are aware that over the past 20 months, this Administration has removed or forced out approximately 20 non-partisan inspectors general in favor of politically aligned replacements,” their 26-page letter states. “In that regard, the investigations we are requesting constitute a further test of the IG system under this Administration.”

On Jan. 24, 2025, just four days into his second term, Donald Trump fired more than a dozen inspectors general.

The Justice Department’s then-longtime inspector general Michael Horowitz survived that purge, but he stepped down in June, leaving a vacancy currently filled by Don R. Berthiaume, Jr. The controversial IG nominee refused during his confirmation to describe the Jan. 6th insurrection as an “attack” on the Capitol, and he was confirmed largely along partisan lines by a 51-47 margin.

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‘Full and fair review’

Berthiaume is one of the recipients of the letter demanding an investigation, and the other is the Interior Department’s acting inspector general Caryl Brzymialkiewicz, who replaced her Trump-fired predecessor Mark Lee Greenblatt.

Citing this history, Hearn’s lawyers warned: “The investigations must not be conducted in a partisan fashion, nor result in politically motivated whitewashes, notwithstanding any pressure internal or external to the Administration.”

“Anything less than a full and fair review would be a betrayal of your mission and perpetuate the outrageous mistreatment of Mr. Hearn,” they wrote. “We are prepared to take further steps to assure accountability.”

Hearn’s attorneys didn’t immediately respond to a press inquiry asking what other steps might follow.

Read the 21-page referral letter and four-page appendix here.

Former state and federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah, who previously served as Westchester’s district attorney, used the same language a day before in an editorial for MSNOW calling for Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten — whose jurisdiction typically includes Cornell University — to recuse himself and ask the court to appoint the special prosecutor.

Rocah explained why she reached that conclusion during a Substack Live conversation this morning, clarifying the details of New York’s “voluntary intoxication” law, the legal ramifications of the fraternity brothers’ Snapchat messages, and the unusual aspects of DA Van Houten’s nine-page statement.

As discussed in the video, Doe’s lawsuit largely tracks her signed statement to campus police — with one exception: The police statement has no commentary on what happened, and her civil complaint does. (Compare them here.)

Rocah questioned the purpose of releasing so much information and commentary about the case into the public domain while announcing the opening of an investigation.

“If he charged crimes, the defendants would have said, ‘Yeah, of course you charged crimes. You’re trying to save your reputation here.’ And they would have had a good argument,” Rocah said. “And if he hadn’t charged crimes, she and her lawyer and lots of people out there would have said, ‘Of course you didn’t charge crimes. You didn’t want to look like you made the wrong decision to begin with.’”

She added that many local prosecutors have expressed “shock” about the lack of an investigation.

“There is no question in my mind that he did not do his job here,” she added, referring to Van Houten.

You can watch the archived video of the conversation at the top of this newsletter.

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Here is the full video of our conversation, and you can read more about the decision here on All Rise News.

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Former Olympian David Hearn received protection from another “meritless, politically driven prosecution” on Thursday, as a federal judge took the rare step of dismissing his criminal case with prejudice.

D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman made clear that he was shielding Hearn from the vindictive demands of Donald Trump.

“Should the Court dismiss this case in a fashion that allows the government to reinitiate prosecution in the future, the Court would be exposing him to the risk that, due to pressure from the President of the United States apparently motivated at least in part by Mr. Hearn’s political views, he would again be charged with a crime that prosecutors have determined he did not commit,” Judge Edelman wrote in a scathing, 26-page opinion.

‘Miscarriage of justice’

In June, Hearn visited the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and was arrested after being spotted touching a strip of peeling sealant.

At the time, Trump had been humiliated by the speedy unraveling of his $16 million renovation, and he baselessly claimed that the shoddy paint job and pervasive algae had been the work of vandals. Prosecutors quickly empaneled a grand jury, and they charged Hearn and others less than two weeks later, which the judge described as a “near-record pace.”

Those prosecutions collapsed in equally breakneck fashion.

After Hearn’s lawyers obtained evidence through discovery, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s legal team moved to dismiss his case in late July, admitting that the damage was caused by the “rushed and botched” contracting work and that the “overspray” of the sealant was of little to no value. Prosecutors conceded that the lack of damage made it impossible to sustain felony charges for causing $1,000 or more in destruction to government property.

Hearn’s attorneys Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann, and Steve Levin called their client’s ordeal a “miscarriage of justice” that should “shock every American.”

“Today’s dismissal with prejudice ensures that the DOJ cannot bring this case against him again. This decision is a victory for the rule of law and for an innocent American seeking justice,” they wrote in a statement.

‘Practically inconceivable’

During a hearing earlier this month, Judge Edelman sharply questioned what evidence could possibly emerge to justify reviving the case against Hearn.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Spence replied at the time: “I don’t know what the future may bring, None of us do.”

The judge said that the response showed that the government couldn’t imagine “anything close to a legitimate” purpose for continuing to pursue the case.

“Given its own description of the existing evidence and the circumstances of this case, the development of contrary evidence seems practically inconceivable, and the possibility of a future meritorious prosecution strikes the Court as fanciful,” the ruling states.

The only reason Judge Edelman could conceive was appeasing Trump.

“Although the prosecutors assigned to this case have deemed it meritless, the President of the United States has repeatedly disparaged them and pressured them to change course. Mr. Hearn thus finds himself differently situated than any of the other defendants who have had their cases dismissed in Superior Court: while the prosecutors admit that the evidence indicates that he committed no crime, the President’s statements create a risk that Mr. Hearn will be prosecuted nonetheless, either because the current United States Attorney and her assistants will eventually yield to his public pressure campaign or because the President will replace them with prosecutors more likely to carry out his wishes,” he wrote.

Given Hearn’s initial indictment, the judge ridiculed the prosecution’s argument that a grand jury would protect him from further charges as nothing short of "facetious."

Read the scathing, 26-page opinion in full here.