“Unprecedented and Illegal”: Lisa Cook Sues Trump—and Jerome Powell

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, whom Donald Trump is seeking to fire in an escalating campaign of lawfare against his political enemies, is officially taking the president to court.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Fed board member says Trump’s “concocted basis” for her removal fails to “amount to ‘cause’”—and is an “unprecedented and illegal” violation of her due process rights as well as the central bank’s independence.

Stunningly, the lawsuit also names Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and the Board of Governors as defendants.

Trump on Monday fired Cook over (seemingly vengeance-driven) accusations of mortgage fraud. The lawsuit, however, says the allegations are “pretextual, in order to effectuate her prompt removal and vacate a seat for President Trump to fill and forward his agenda to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve.”

Cause, under the Federal Reserve Act, means “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” But even if Trump’s authority to remove a Fed board member goes beyond that, Cook’s lawyers state, he is not allowed to “unilaterally redefine ‘cause’—completely unmoored to caselaw, history, and tradition—and conclude, without evidence, that he has found it.”

“Certainly,” the suit continues, “a policy dispute between the President and a Governor does not constitute ‘cause.’ Neither does a specious assertion that a one ‘potentially’ committed a crime—one which is unproven, uncharged, and unrelated to official conduct.”

So expansive is Trump’s “conception of ‘cause,’” Cook warns, that “it would allow him to remove any Federal Reserve Board member with whom he disagrees about policy based on chalked up allegations.”

The lawsuit also notes that Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has lobbed accusations of mortgage-related misdeeds against others of late (i.e., Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James). Notably, Cook’s lawyers note, each of Pulte’s criminal referrals have been “at one time or another, political targets of President Trump’s ire prior to any mortgage fraud allegations.”

This fact has caused suspicions that Pulte is working through an enemies list—perhaps even handed down from the White House. And, as TNR’s Greg Sargent observed this week, the discovery process in Cook’s case against Trump could help reveal potential White House involvement.

This story has been updated.

Constituents in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District showered Representative Ashley Hinson with boos and jeers for supporting President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill.

The Republican lawmaker was excoriated during a town hall Wednesday in Worth County, where Iowans urged Hinson to “stop lying” after she baselessly claimed that the president’s key legislation had ushered in “higher wages” and an improved cost of living.

“Higher wages?” shouted one woman incredulously. “For who? For you?”

“Cost of living is higher than it’s ever been,” another woman said.

Hinson, a former TV journalist, has been remarkably unpopular at town halls across her state as she ardently defends Trump’s agenda. She faced even more heat in May when she told a crowd in Elkader that she was “proud to vote for President Trump’s ‘one big beautiful bill’,” eliciting so much contempt from the crowd that they yelled at her until she stopped speaking.

“You are a fraud,” a constituent shouted at her at the time.

Hinson isn’t the only MAGA legislator who has gotten scorched during the last few weeks for voting against the interests of her constituents.

Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman faced outrage last week for supporting Trump’s tariffs, New York Representative Elise Stefanik was roundly booed by a feisty crowd when she emerged in Plattsburg Monday to rename a county building, and Nebraska Representative Mike Flood was excoriated during a town hall earlier this month for failing to protect SNAP benefits, veterans’ programs, and health care access, which combined with voters’ simmering resentment for lagging on the release of the Epstein files.

Republicans were advised earlier this year by party leadership to avoid engaging in town halls, since the format would give voters the opportunity to voice their disagreement with Trump’s policies.

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley faced a similarly explosive town hall in April, when he was pressed to defend the president’s flippant attitude toward the Supreme Court when he defied an order related to Kilmar Armando Ábrego García.

Voters blew up at him again the following week in Northwood. Grassley hasn’t hosted a town hall since.

The evening after Wednesday’s mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Fox News host Sean Hannity proposed a “simple” solution that, in reality, would have done nothing to prevent the tragedy earlier that day.

“School shootings are preventable, and simple, basic, common-sense actions can mitigate these tragedies,” Hannity told his audience. “If we have the desire to stop school shootings, this is the first thing you should do: Every school in the country should have a metal detector. You have them at airports. You have them when you’re around elected politicians.”

It’s unclear what a metal detector would have done to prevent Wednesday’s shooting, in which the perpetrator opened fire from outside of the church, through its windows.

According to the Minneapolis police chief, “the gunman approached on the outside, on the side of the building, and began firing a rifle through the church windows towards the children sitting in the pews at the mass” inside.

Citing a parent who was in the church as the shooting took place, The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that the “shooter opened fire outside the building with some kind of semiautomatic weapon.” The unnamed eyewitness said the perpetrator “just pepper-sprayed through the stained-glass windows into the building, 50 to 100 shots.”

Hannity went on to recommend controlling “the entry of kids and the perimeter around every school,” and placing armed retired servicemembers or law enforcement officers in schools.

“The left’s rush to immediately blame Republicans, race to blame guns, for every tragedy, it’s sad and pathetic, but it’s predictable,” the Fox host concluded—himself racing to blame anything but firearms for what took place Wednesday, to the point of espousing a woefully inadequate solution that could have never stopped it.

Tulsi Gabbard’s title of Director of National Intelligence becomes more ironic everyday.

Gabbard reportedly shocked Central Intelligence Agency officials last week after she revoked an undercover operative’s security clearance and posted their name on social media, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Gabbard revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former intelligence officials who had been involved in producing intelligence assessments related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. She claimed to have done this at the direction of President Donald Trump.

The director was apparently unaware that the CIA officer she doxxed had been working undercover, according to one person familiar with the events. Three other people said she did not adequately confer with the CIA about the composition of the list, but delivered the list to the CIA the evening before she posted it to social media.

ODNI did not seek the CIA’s input about the composition of the list, and the CIA was not made aware of her intention to post it on X, according to two people familiar with the events.

Larry Pfeiffer, a former chief of staff at the CIA, told the Journal that the intelligence director had made a stupid mistake.

“A smart [director of national intelligence] would have consulted with CIA,” he said. “It could potentially put CIA cover procedures at risk. It could put relations with foreign governments at risk.”

Gabbard has dug into a months-long campaign to discredit an intelligence community assessment that found that Russian President Vladimir Putin had aspired to see Trump enter the White House, over Hillary Clinton. (Putin later admitted as much.)

Gabbard also recently announced plans to gut ODNI’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, alleging that it had been used by the Biden administration to “justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.”

This is another ironic move from Gabbard, who has a history of foisting foreign misinformation on the American public herself.

In a remarkable development following Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ouster of the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, four other high-ranking officials have reportedly resigned.

Letters from three of the officials have been publicized thus far, and their messages include warnings that the agency’s mission has been compromised under RFK Jr.’s stewardship, with anti-vaccine policies and other growing misinformation.

The outgoing officials are Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Dr. Jennifer Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology.

“For the good of the nation and the world, the science at CDC should never be censored or subject to political pauses or interpretations. Vaccines save lives—this is an indisputable, well-established, scientific fact,” Houry wrote in an email to her colleagues. She added that “the overstating of risks and the rise of misinformation have cost lives,” citing a spike in measles as well as the August 8 shooting at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters.

“My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud,” Daskalakis wrote in his resignation letter, which he shared on X. “I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.” He cited, among other agency actions, changes to the vaccine schedule for children and adults and the administration’s “efforts to erase transgender populations.”

“Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.”

Jernigan also informed her colleagues that, “given the current context in the Department, I feel it is best for me to offer my resignation.”

Border Patrol agents arrested two firefighters battling the Bear Gulch fire, the biggest active wildfire in Washington state, according to The Seattle Times.

On Wednesday morning, two different crews of firefighters were cutting wood while waiting for their superior to arrive when Customs and Border Patrol agents showed up in “Police” vests. The federal agents made the entire crew line up and show ID, eventually detaining the two firefighters without giving them a chance to say goodbye to their fellow crew members and loved ones.

Multiple firefighters present at the scene spoke to the Times anonymously out of fear of retribution.

It’s extremely unusual for federal agents to make an arrest during an active wildfire, especially in an isolated location like Bear Gulch. All while the fire gets actively worse as temperatures rise.

“I asked them if his (family) can say goodbye to him because they’re family, and they’re just ripping them away,” another firefighter told the Times. “And this is what he said: ‘You need to get the (expletive) out of here. I’m gonna make you leave.’”

For Border Patrol to arrest two firefighters battling a growing wildfire shows once again that President Trump’s immigration crackdown has never been about the dangerous, hardened, criminal murderers he rants about. It’s about keeping America white and free of immigrants from south of the border.

As of Wednesday morning, the Bear Gulch fire rages on, covering almost 9,000 acres at only 13 percent containment. Arresting those firefighters in the midst of doing their duty only leaves their crew with less manpower in a situation where it’s sorely needed.

“You risked your life out here to save the community,” one firefighter said. “This is how they treat us.”

The recently-appointed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is already on her way out, with less than a month in the role under her belt.

Susan Monarez, a longtime government scientist who was sworn into office on July 31, was removed before the end of August according to multiple administration officials familiar with the matter who spoke with The Washington Post.

Monarez’s ouster also comes just one day after the CDC scaled back a program monitoring food contaminants at the national level, because there reportedly wasn’t enough funding available to track all eight pathogens.

Speaking anonymously with the Post, CDC employees shared that Monarez had scheduled an agencywide call for Monday, but it was cancelled Friday. It’s unclear what exactly prompted the meeting’s cancellation, or her removal.

Kennedy announced in May that the COVID-19 vaccine would no longer be included in the CDC’s recommended immunizations for healthy children and pregnant women, bypassing scientific review and angering the medical community. Monarez had previously earned a PhD in microbiology and immunology, and conducted research on developing technologies aimed for the treatment of infectious diseases. It’s possible that this experience placed her at odds with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine policies.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey excoriated transphobes for tying a mass shooting to their hateful ideology.

At a press conference Wednesday about the Annunciation Catholic School shooting Wednesday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called out groups and individuals for attacking the trans community in the wake of the horrific event.  

“Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity,” Frey said. “We should not be operating out of a place of hate for anyone. We should be operating from a place of our love for kids … kids died today,” he said. 

The FBI identified the shooter as 23-year-old Robin Westman, who graduated from the school in 2017 and, according to officials, identified as a trans woman. Westman killed two children—an 8- and 10-year-old—when she opened fire on the building at the beginning of mass, wounding 14 other children between the ages of six and 15. Three adults in their 80s were also injured.

Authorities announced during the press briefing that they expected all the other victims to recover, though they emphasized their varying degrees of injury.

Westman was found dead from self-inflicted injuries Wednesday morning, police told CNN. 

Police officers in the city are “deeply traumatized” by what they saw, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told reporters. Westman’s weapons were purchased legally and were “purchased recently,” according to O’Hara.

During the same press conference, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stressed that children in the community had arrived at Annunciation Wednesday morning to learn and be curious, but were instead met with “evil and horror and death.”

“There shouldn’t be words for these types of incidents, because they should not happen,” Walz said.”There’s no words that are going to ease the pain of the families today.”

This post has been updated.

On Wednesday, conservative Fox News host and former Republican Representative Trey Gowdy floated the need for stricter gun control laws in response to the shooting that killed two schoolchildren in Minneapolis earlier in the day.

Gowdy said of the tragedy, “The only way to stop it is to identify the shooter ahead of time or keep the weapons out of their hands.” He then suggested it’s time for a national reckoning on guns.

“We’re going to have to have a conversation of freedom versus protecting children. I mean, how many school shootings does it take before we’re going to have a conversation about keeping firearms out—” he said, not finishing the statement as he went on to observe that the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are white men.

“It’s always a young white male, almost always,” Gowdy said. (Though reports Wednesday afternoon indicate that the identified shooter may have been a white transgender woman.)

As a congressman, Gowdy received money from the National Rifle Association and even spoke at the group’s 2016 “leadership forum.” He also questioned the need for tighter gun laws. After the 2018 Parkland high school shooting, he said, “Before we began to advocate for new laws, I think it is eminently fair to say, ‘How are we doing enforcing the ones we currently have?’”

Gowdy’s perspective had changed as of Wednesday: When co-host Lisa Boothe suggested that there are already “laws on the books for these types of situations,” Gowdy was skeptical, asking, “Like what?”

“Well, murder,” Boothe replied, before shifting the conversation somewhat.

Gowdy’s comments sparked outrage online from MAGA, which flooded X with calls for his firing from Fox News. “Trey Gowdy hates you and wants to take your guns,” wrote MAGA provocateur Mike Cernovich, who also accused him of “pushing for gun control and anti-white hatred.” “Shameful,” said the Florida-based pro-Trump personality Eric Daugherty.

It looks like Florida may finally be taking down the tents of its premier wetland-themed concentration camp.

Florida Division of Emergency Management Executive Director Kevin Guthrie sent an email about chaplaincy services at the ramshackle immigration detention facility, also known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” to Rabbi Mario Rojzman last week, The Associated Press reported. In the message, Guthrie claimed that the facility was “probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days.”

The email was sent August 22, the same day that a federal judge gave the government just two months to remove the facility’s fencing, lighting, and generators—rendering it unusable and forcing officials to clear out its detainee population.

In her ruling in a lawsuit brought by environmental groups, U.S. District Judge Kathleeen Williams also rejected the government’s claim that “Alligator Alcatraz” was run by the state of Florida, not ICE, making it subject to federal requirements.

The government has already appealed the decision, arguing that forcing the facility’s rapid closure was a hardship that would compromise its ability to enforce immigration laws. Elise Pautler Bennett, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Associated Press that Guthrie’s email undermined the government’s argument.

“If it was so difficult, they would not have already accomplished it, largely,” Bennett said.

Earlier this month, the judge ordered Florida to halt construction at the facility, which both detainees and former employees said had nightmarish living conditions. Immigration attorneys have reported they were unable to contact their clients, who went missing from ICE’s detainee tracker inside the supposedly state-run facility.

It’s not entirely clear where exactly the hundreds of detainees have been moved.

At one point, the facility held nearly 1,000 people, but last week Florida Representative Maxwell Frost said that roughly 300 detainees remained. The Associated Press reported that about 100 detainees have been deported, and others have been transferred to other detention facilities, but it’s unclear whether these are federal or state facilities.