Judge to Launch Criminal Contempt Proceedings Into Trump Officials

A judge said Wednesday there is probable cause to hold Donald Trump’s administration in criminal contempt for refusing to turn around the El Salvador–bound planes carrying more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants last month. 

In a 46-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote that the government’s actions “demonstrate a willful disregard” of his previous order that barred Trump from deporting the Venezuelan immigrants—the majority of whom have no criminal record—to El Salvador, where they are currently being held in CECOT, a prison notorious for human rights abuses. 

Trump deported the immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an archaic law that has only been invoked three times before, most famously for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The White House’s blatant disregard of Boasberg’s order is “sufficient to conclude” that there is probable cause for criminal contempt, the judge wrote, adding that none of the government’s explanations have been satisfactory. 

Following Boasberg’s first ruling, Trump asked the Supreme Court to impeach the Obama-appointed judge, which Chief Justice Roberts refused, in a rare but telling public statement.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts said on March 18.   

The Supreme Court did however overturn Boasberg’s order at Trump’s request on April 7, giving the president the go-ahead to continue deporting innocent immigrants under the wartime powers act. Last week, the U.S. deported 10 more people it claimed were gang members to El Salvador, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Trump administration contended to Boasberg that the Supreme Court’s ruling should protect it from criminal contempt, but the judge clearly is fed up with the White House’s relentless excuses.

“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg’s ruling reads.

This story has been updated.

Does MAGA have any idea what due process is? Do they care?

Donald Trump’s acolytes continue to insist against providing due process to undocumented immigrants the government claims are gang members.

In March, more than 200 alleged gang members, whose deportations to prison in El Salvador were expedited under the Alien Enemies Act, were denied the right to challenge their designation and removal under the AEA. In many cases, lawyers for the detainees were not even notified that their clients were being deported.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, an anti-immigrant legal activist, has set off on a campaign against “due process” for undocumented immigrants, or whatever he thinks due process is, in support of Trump’s mass deportation plot.

During an appearance on Fox News Tuesday night, while discussing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, Miller claimed that “under the due process that these Democrats so venerate for illegal invaders, it is legally impermissible for him to have one more minute in this country.”

But that’s not how due process works. It was a judge who originally stated that Abrego Garcia could not be removed to El Salvador, and the government’s mistake caused him to be deported.

Members of the Trump administration have claimed that Abrego Garcia is a “convicted” member of MS-13 who was “engaged in human trafficking,” without providing any evidence. Due process would present an opportunity for the government to present any legal justification for an individual’s removal, but because it apparently has none, the process must be elided.

Jack Posobiec, a MAGA activist, also had a loose understanding of what due process is.

“Did Rachel Morin get due process? Did Laken Riley get due process?” he wrote in a post on X Tuesday, referring to two women who were killed by undocumented immigrants. “No one ever asks that.”

Most people never ask about that because the question doesn’t make any sense.

Due process is a legal protection for all people against the U.S. government set out in the Fifth Amendment, and then applied to states in the Fourteenth Amendment.

“No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” the Fifth Amendment stated. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 1993 Supreme Court ruling that “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”

Posobiec’s baseless comment echoes one from border czar Tom Homan, who said last month, “Due process? What was Laken Riley’s due process? Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TdA, where was their due process?”

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that while the Trump administration could continue deportations under the AEA, it needed to provide detainees with the opportunity to file habeas corpus challenges, a complex and rarely successful legal procedure. The court also ruled that these needed to be filed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a MAGA-aligned court in Texas where the deportation flights are staged.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency claims to have found new unemployment benefit fraud, but the information is just recycled findings from the Joe Biden era.

Last week, Musk revealed the results of DOGE’s investigation into unemployment benefits, the latest federal safety net program to fall victim to the billionaire’s unbacked claims and flat-out lies. He revealed thousands of seemingly shocking fraudulent claims, like toddlers and thousands of people over 100 years old receiving unemployment checks.

DOGE reportedly found that 28,000 people under the age of 5 collected $254 million in benefits, nearly 10,000 people with listed birthdates more than 15 years from now received $69 million, and 24,500 people over 115 claimed $59 million benefits.

“Your tax dollars were going to pay fraudulent unemployment claims for fake people born in the future!” Musk wrote on X last week, using the information to rally the right against the federal safety net. “There was no sanity check for impossibly young or impossibly old people for unemployment insurance.”

But it turns out federal investigators discovered the same information years ago under Biden, and the claims weren’t fraudulent in the way Musk has made them out to be, according to a new report from The Guardian.

After Trump launched Covid-19 unemployment benefits in 2020 during his first term, the program became a target for identity theft and fraudulent claims. Within weeks, the Department of Labor warned states of an uptick in “imposter claims being filed with stolen or synthetic identities.”

To record the imposter claims but protect those whose identities were being stolen, states recorded “pseudo claims,” in which they’d change a person’s date of birth to prevent their information from leaking. That led to thousands of records of claims from toddlers and centenarians.

“Many of the claims identified … were not payments to individuals over 100 years of age, but rather ‘pseudo records’ of previously identified fraudulent claims,” a 2023 memo from the Labor Department reads.

Biden additionally allocated $2 billion to improve fraud detection in state unemployment programs, which resulted in 2,000 conditions and more than $1 billion in recovered funds. Despite this, MAGA has rallied around DOGE’s supposedly scandalous findings and is using them to justify the GOP’s assault on federal funding.

“Another incredible discovery,” Labor Secretary Loria Cahez-DeRemer wrote on X, following DOGE’s investigation reveal.

It turns out this “incredible discovery” was just another false claim from the billionaire used to justify his egregious attack on low-income people across the country.

Donald Trump is going after New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump’s federal housing director, William Pulte, issued a criminal referral for James to the Department of Justice, alleging she committed mortgage fraud. The Federal Housing Finance Agency director claims James “falsified bank documents and property records to acquire government backed assistance and loans and more favorable loan terms.”

James won a $464 million civil fraud suit against Trump, his companies, and business associates last year over his business practices, a case the president is still appealing. He has carried a vendetta against James ever since, most recently attacking his enemy in a Truth Social post Monday.

“Letitia James, a totally corrupt politician, should resign from her position as New York State Attorney General, IMMEDIATELY. Everyone is trying to MAKE NEW YORK GREAT AGAIN, and it can never be done with this wacky crook in office,” Trump posted, sharing a New York Post article reporting on the allegations against James.

James’s office responded by calling Trump a bully.

“Attorney General James is focused every single day on protecting New Yorkers, especially as this Administration weaponizes the federal government against the rule of law and the Constitution,” a spokesperson said in an email to Axios Tuesday night. “She will not be intimidated by bullies—no matter who they are.”

Trump has embarked on a campaign of retribution against his enemies, taking multiple punitive measures against the state of Maine for refusing to abide by his executive order against transgender athletes. He has stripped the security clearances of two of his prominent critics, former administration employees Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. It seems that he is willing to weaponize the state against anyone who crosses him.

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that the Department of Justice was suing the state of Maine for failing to comply with the president’s executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.

The lawsuit follows the Trump administration’s announcement that it would suspend all federal education funding from Maine, over the Maine Principals Association’s decision to allow transgender women to compete with other women. The all-out war started after a fiery exchange at the White House in February, where Maine Governor Janet Mills was singled out by Donald Trump but refused to legitimize gender discrimination, saying she would continue to comply with state and federal law.

“See you in court,” Mills told the president at the time. Mills has stated that the inclusion of transgender athletes in women’s sports is protected under Maine’s Human Rights Act, which protects against discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

During Bondi’s announcement, the attorney general tried to downplay that Trump’s inane executive order supposedly protecting women and children actually applied to only a few people in the state.

“I don’t care if it’s one, I don’t care if it’s two, I don’t care if it’s 100!” Bondi said, referring to how many transgender girls are high school athletes in Maine. It’s two, actually, according to the Maine Principals Association.

Ultimately, the supposedly widespread threat that Trump and Bondi seek to address doesn’t actually exist. NCAA President Charlie Baker told a Senate panel there were fewer than 10 transgender athletes in the entire athletic association. Further, Republicans’ repeated attempts to smear transgender women as threatening lacks a basis in reality, and simply serves as a means to win culture-war points with a transphobic voter base.

But Bondi wasn’t so concerned about the specifics of her argument on executing Trump’s agenda. In an appearance on Fox News Tuesday, Bondi falsely claimed that Riley Gaines, a swimmer for the University of Kentucky and anti-trans activist who appeared onstage with the attorney general for her announcement, had made it to the Olympics.

In fact, Gaines received fifth place in the 200-yard NCAA freestyle championship, and tied with University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who became the first out transwoman champion in the NCAA women’s division.

Bondi warned that Minnesota and California were the “top two” states that would be targeted for their protections for transgender individuals.

Since Trump’s row with Mills, his administration has unleashed a barrage of actions targeting the state. Earlier this month, lawmakers called for the head of the Social Security Administration to resign after it was revealed that he’d attempted to shut Maine out of the insurance program altogether.

Last month, Trump froze millions of dollars in federal funding from the Department of Agriculture to the University of Maine system, which supports several universities. The Department of Education launched an investigation into the state’s Department of Education for alleged Title IX violations, the Department of Health and Human Services targeted the state’s Education Department, and the USDA launched an investigation into the University of Maine.

Donald Trump was apparently mad at Elon Musk for planning to attend a secret briefing on China at the Pentagon last month.

After news of that briefing was reported in The New York Times, Trump angrily canceled it, saying, “What the f**k is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn’t go,” an unnamed top official told Axios.

The official said that “POTUS still very much loves Elon, but there are some red lines.”

“Elon has a lot of business in China and he has good relations there, and this briefing just wasn’t the right thing,” said the official.

In March, Trump vehemently denied the Times report, calling the publication “Fake News” and saying the story was “completely untrue” in a ranting Truth Social post. At the same time, Musk was also upset, calling the story “pure propaganda” on his X account, and said, “I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT. They will be found.”

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suspended two DOD officials, Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick, as part of an investigation into who leaked the news of Musk’s briefing, as well as other leaks regarding Panama Canal military plans, Red Sea operations, and intelligence collection in Ukraine.

But the fact that Trump blew up over Musk’s access suggests that there are limits to the tech oligarch and fascism enthusiast’s influence in the White House. There have been reports that Musk will be bowing out of the Trump administration, but Musk has called them “fake news” and his Department of Government Efficiency continues to gut the federal government. Is this the beginning of Trump souring on his wealthy benefactor?

Far-right Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stumbled Tuesday night when faced with tough questions about her allegiance to Donald Trump at a chaotic town hall that led to three arrests. 

Several individuals were removed for disrupting Greene’s town hall at a community center in Acworth, Georgia. 

While Greene railed against undocumented immigrants, one protester started shouting about the Ku Klux Klan, which historically targeted Black Georgians in Greene’s district. 

The protester, as she was escorted out by security, shouted, “You butch body bigot! You butch body bigot!” 

“The protest is outside! Bye, have fun out there,” Greene sneered. 

The protester’s chide echoed that of Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett, who went so far as to trademark her burn against Greene, “bleach blonde bad-built butch body.”

Another protester with a “Jail 4 Insider Traders” banner was also removed by security. Greene disclosed Monday that she had bought between $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks last week in 17 companies including Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and Palantir, buying into the stock market dip just hours before Trump announced he was partially pausing some of his tariffs. The stock market shot back up as a result.

In total, three people were arrested, including two who engaged in a physical altercation and were tasered by Acworth police, according to NBC News. 

At a closed-door meeting last month, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Representative Richard Hudson, advised his colleagues not to hold town hall meetings at all, after several Republicans came face-to-face with their angry constituents. 

Greene had her own solution: to mock the concerns of constituents. 

She made no attempt to conceal her disdain as she read a question about how she planned to “protect” her constituents in Georgia’s 14th district from the effects of Trump’s tariff polices, the gutting of Social Security and Medicaid, the Department of Government Efficiency’s massive government spending cuts, and a president who ignores the rule of law. 

“He is not well physically or mentally, and he’s making nonsensical orders based on his whim of the day. How are you going to rein him in to protect us?” Greene read.

“Oh, poor Christina. Poor, poor Christina. Well, I’m sure, Christina, you think you’re pretty smart, but the reality is you are being completely brainwashed by whatever source of news you listen to,” she sneered.  

Greene insisted that no one (besides criminals, fraudsters, and undocumented immigrants) had lost their Social Security or benefits and proudly declared that she intended to “stand by” her president. 

In fact, the Trump administration and DOGE are making fast plans to shrink the Social Security Administration, phasing out essential phone services and cutting staff, placing an incredible strain on field offices around the country. Around 2,800 SSA employees have already taken buyouts, according to agency data. And House Republicans all readily approved a budget that would see massive cuts to Medicaid in order to fund an extension on Trump’s 2017 tax plan, lightening the load for the very rich at the expense of the poor. 

Greene continued to openly laugh as she fielded questions submitted by her concerned constituents. 

“Why are you such a coward in the face of an obvious fascist takeover?” Greene read aloud. 

“Ooooh, scary! That’s scary. You know, I’ve yet to see a fascist gathering. That doesn’t exist in the Republican Party. As a matter of fact, President Trump is the most transparent president in history. The man literally talks to the press every single day,” Greene said. 

It’s true that Trump often speaks to the press, but when he does he tends to discuss his fascist plans to exile U.S. citizens to foreign prisons. 

If Kilmar Abrego Garcia successfully returns to the United States, the Department of Justice plans to detain him again and send him to a different country than El Salvador, or get rid of his withholding of removal and send him back to El Salvador.

That’s what the DOJ filed in federal court Tuesday, ahead of a hearing with Judge Paula Xinis where the Trump administration was supposed to provide information on steps it had taken to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. from El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a megaprison known for human rights abuses where he is currently detained.

The DOJ didn’t provide any new information on Abrego Garcia, although the filing did once again repeat the administration’s false assertion, echoed by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, that the building trades worker is actually a member of the violent MS-13 gang and shows how insistent it is that Abrego Garcia can’t stay in the U.S. 

This is despite the fact that the government previously admitted in court that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported, violating a judge’s 2019 order preventing him from being sent back to El Salvador. In response to a Supreme Court order that Abrego Garcia must be returned, the government has attempted to argue semantics over the high court’s use of the word “facilitate,” claiming that it can’t go any further than taking action domestically. 

In reality, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to ignore the Supreme Court because the president wants to set a precedent that deportations are final. If Abrego Garcia is successfully returned, it’ll give immigrants hope that they can find recourse in the law and lessen their fear, and that isn’t the climate the administration wants. 

Any concession or acknowledgment of the court’s ruling is a win for Trump’s opponents, and the president has a history of blindly refusing to acknowledge that he’s lost. Trump wants to wield absolute power with no checks on his authority, the Constitution be damned.

A top adviser for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was abruptly placed on administrative leave after he was connected to an information leak at the Department of Defense, Reuters reported Tuesday. 

Dan Caldwell was escorted from the Pentagon Tuesday and is being investigated for an “unauthorized disclosure” of classified DOD information, an anonymous U.S. official told Reuters. 

It’s unclear what leaked intelligence Caldwell is being investigated for, but he was wrapped up in last month’s Signalgate scandal, in which members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet discussed U.S. military plans to bomb the Houthis in Yemen in a Signal group chat that also happened to include The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Along with Caldwell, 18 Trump officials were presumed to be part of the chat, including Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and national security adviser Mike Walz. 

The following week, the DOD released a memo requesting an investigation into the “recent unauthorized disclosures of national security information.”  

“This investigation will commence immediately and culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense,” the memo, written by Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, reads. “I expect to be informed immediately if this effort results in information identifying a party responsible for an unauthorized disclosure, and that such information will be referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution.”

Caldwell’s investigation “remains ongoing,” the U.S. official told Reuters.

Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said Tuesday that leaders from cities and states with sanctuary policies could expect to face prosecution very soon.

A reporter outside of the White House asked Homan whether he believed that the leaders of sanctuary states and cities should be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and possibly go to prison,” alleging that they’d violated law prohibiting U.S. citizens from transporting, smuggling, or harboring undocumented immigrants.

“Absolutely, and hold tight on that one,” Homan replied. “’Cus it’s coming. It’s coming.”

Sanctuary cities and states have policies in place that limit coordination and information sharing with federal immigration authorities about noncitizens. This allows noncitizens to be able to report crimes, acquire homes and jobs, and participate in society without fear of being deported.

ICE officials are still able to arrest undocumented immigrants in places with sanctuary polices, and if undocumented immigrants commit crimes, they are processed by local law enforcement similarly to how anyone else would be.

The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative, anti-immigrant think tank, has identified 13 so-called sanctuary states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Washington.

Trump repeatedly and vastly overstated the supposed dangers of sanctuary cities as part of his presidential campaign. At a rally in September, he announced his plan to eradicate sanctuary cities from the state of North Carolina, where there are none.

Last week, Trump said that he was working on a plan to withhold all federal funding for any city or state with sanctuary policies.

“No more Sanctuary Cities! They protect the Criminals, not the Victims. They are disgracing our Country, and are being mocked all over the World. Working on papers to withhold all Federal Funding for any City or State that allows these Death Traps to exist!!!” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.