Judge Aileen Cannon Is Back—and Poised to Do More Damage for Trump

The Department of Justice is teeing up a sprawling conspiracy investigation into Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies, which will be sent to the same judge who got the president his get-out-jail free card.

During an appearance on MSNBC Tuesday, legal analyst Barbara McQuade discussed this “noteworthy” aspect of the efforts by prosecutors in South Florida to investigate individuals linked to the previous Democratic administrations for allegedly working to undermine Trump’s candidacies and presidencies.

“The grand jury to be impaneled is going to be in Fort Pierce, Florida,” McQuade said. “That of course is the district, the portion of the district, the Southern District of Florida, that has one and only one judge, and that judge is Aileen Cannon.”

Cannon made the unprecedented decision in July 2024 to toss out the felony classified documents case against Trump by ruling special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Her move has been criticized by legal scholars but repeatedly celebrated by Trump.

“I don’t know that we should be suspicious of everything Aileen Cannon does, but we do know that her track record in the Mar-a-Lago case with the documents was first to impose some really extraordinary hoops for the prosecutors to go through at the time of the search, and then of course the dismissal of the case finding the special counsel regulations to be unconstitutional, contrary to every other court that has looked at it,” McQuade continued.

“So, I think that there’s reason to be very concerned about the irregularities that are occurring in this office,” she added.

On Friday, the U.S. attorney’s office in Southern Florida issued 30 subpoenas to individuals such former CIA director John Brennan, and other former intelligence officials. Shortly before Executive Assistant United States Attorney Manolo Reboso signed off on the subpoenas, two career U.S. attorneys resigned because they “felt like there was something they could not take part in because it would violate their ethical responsibilities,” according to MSNBC.

McQuade said it was abnormal for Reboso to sign the subpoenas, as he was the third-highest ranking official in the office. She suggested that Reboso could be leading the investigation as a special project.

“I do think it’s noteworthy that this is not being handled the way a routine case would be handled, for violation of the law, instead it is being handled as a special case with a high level executive member of the team handling this,” McQuade said.

A source told MSNBC that prosecutors were concerned about being asked to work on a case that could lead to the arrest of figures like Brennan or former President Barack Obama, who Trump has suggested could be a target. “Everyone is on pins and needles,” the source said.

Kash Patel’s tenure as FBI director is not winning him friends in the Trump administration.

His firing of at least 30 bureau agents for being hostile to conservatism or President Trump has drawn the ire of the FBI’s rank-and-file personnel, for one. And he irked the Justice Department with his announcement that the “FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack” on Halloween, despite the fact that no charges had been filed and local police didn’t have details. 

Officials at the DOJ told the White House that Patel’s early announcement had hurt the investigation, The Wall Street Journal reports, and led two friends of the suspects to move up plans to leave the country. His firings have also drawn the ire of the FBI Agents Association, which said in a statement that Patel had “launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution.”

“FBI Agents deal in facts, and we urge Director Patel to do the same,” the statement said.

Plus, Patel used a private FBI jet to see his girlfriend, singer Alexis Wilkins, perform at a wrestling event in Pennsylvania, and later travel to her Nashville home in the midst of a government shutdown. Patel continued to use the jet after that to travel to the Boondoggle Ranch, a hunting resort in Texas owned by the family of a Republican donor, C.R. “Bubba” Saulsbury Jr., according to the Journal, and also visited Scotland in August. 

Ironically, before becoming FBI director, Patel derided the use of a private jet by previous FBI directors. “Chris Wray, hey, you don’t need a government-funded G5 jet so you can fly off to the Adirondacks for vacation,” Patel said on a podcast in 2023.  

The newspaper reports that Trump has expressed his displeasure with Patel in private, although he continues to lend his support to the director. Trump was reportedly upset that Patel hadn’t fired disloyal FBI agents fast enough, and didn’t like how Patel handled the review of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. If the negative press continues, Patel might find his job in jeopardy. 

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have leaked three email exchanges from disgraced sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that allege that President Donald Trump was fully aware of his pedophilia and abuse, stating that his former close friend “knew about the girls.” 

“i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump [sic]. [Redacted] spent hours at my house with him ,, [sic] he has never once been mentioned. police chief etc,” Epstein wrote in 2011 to his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, allegedly referring to one of his sex-trafficking victims. 

“I have been thinking about that…” Maxwell responded. 

In another email to author Michael Wolff, Epstein implies that Trump knew Maxwell was trafficking young women who worked at Mar-a-Lago.

“trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever.  .  of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” he wrote.

Yet another email from December 15, 2015, shows Wolff informing Epstein that CNN was going to ask Trump about their relationship at the next presidential debate.

“if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?” Epstein asked.

“If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency,” Wolff replied, insinuating that Epstein’s word could sink candidate Trump’s reputation. “You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.” Trump was not asked about Epstein at the debate. 

This issue just won’t go away no matter how hard the president tries. From Attorney General Pam Bondi’s botched “client list” reveal to the rushed cover-up and closing of the case, each step the Trump administration has taken to absolve the president—who was close friends with the sex predator—has only led to more startling evidence and more scrutiny. From the birthday book to these emails, it seems highly likely that Trump has not been completely truthful about his relationship with Epstein and knowledge of his heinous activity. And while Trump has shrugged the case off as “stupid” and a “Democrat hoax” in the past, recent developments only indicate that this saga is nowhere near a conclusion.   

The president has yet to respond to the email leaks.

Read the full emails here.

In spite of the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda, the president actually believes that the United States doesn’t have the homegrown talent to excel on its own.

Donald Trump made that much clear during an interview with Fox News Tuesday, ardently defending the H-1B visa, a costly program that allows skilled foreign workers a chance to temporarily work within the U.S., while boasting about America’s AI prowess in comparison to China.

“And does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration? Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers,” said host Laura Ingraham.

But that’s where the president disagreed, arguing that the country needs foreigners to fill American jobs in order to Make America Great Again.

“You also do have to bring in talent,” Trump said.

“We have plenty of talented people here,” pressed Ingraham.

“No you don’t, no you don’t,” Trump said. “No, you don’t have certain talents. And you have to—people have to learn.”

“You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory and we’re going to make missiles’—”, Trump continued before Ingraham interjected.

“How did we ever do it before?” she said, likely referring to the mass mobilization of American factory workers during World War II.

MAGA blasted the interview, furious at the president’s waffling nationalism and his apparent doubt in American excellence.

“I’m sorry but what the fuck is this?” wrote The Blaze’s Logan Hall. “American talent split the atom and went to the moon. American talent built everything the modern world takes for granted now. Give me a break. This is insanity.”

Republican politician and Lake County, Florida, commissioner Anthony Sabatini warned that Trump’s rhetoric could make the GOP lose the midterms.

“We’ve never seen an administration crash & burn in its first year so badly—for no reason other than to appease donors & special interests,” Sabatini posted on X. “Trump has surrounded himself with the worst people.”

Other conservative commentators felt that Trump’s message was remarkably simple.

“Trump hates America and Americans,” tweeted the New York Post’s Kevin Bass. “This is the only explanation I can come up with for this pattern of behavior.… He wants to import the third world to take Americans’ jobs.”

It’s a philosophy that Trump could have picked up from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who vehemently fought to keep the program when it came under fire from MAGA acolytes earlier this year. At the time, Musk argued that there is a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the U.S.

Early-term opposition to the work visa temporarily married some figures on the left and the right, combining the likes of Laura Loomer with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the latter of whom called out Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires for over-leveraging the work visa program to dump good-paying American jobs in favor of absurdly underpaid foreign labor. (Loomer went a more xenophobic route.)

Sanders’s office noted that in 2022 and 2023, “the top 30 corporations using this program laid off at least 85,000 American workers while they hired over 34,000 new H-1B guest workers.”

President Donald Trump’s extrajudicial military strikes have cost the United States yet another intelligence ally.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that Bogota would also stop sharing intelligence with the U.S., following a report that the United Kingdom had stopped sharing some intelligence tracking vessels in the Caribbean.

“Issue the order to all levels of the public security forces’ intelligence to suspend the sending of communications and other dealings with U.S. security agencies. Such a measure will be maintained as long as the missile attack on boats in the Caribbean persists,” Petro wrote on X Tuesday. “The fight against drugs must be subordinated to the human rights of the Caribbean people.”

Historically, the U.S. would use intelligence from its foreign allies to identify vessels that could be involved in drug trafficking. Those boats would be stopped by U.S. officials, boarded, and searched. But recently, Trump has opted to just blow them up, killing dozens of crew members and violating international law.

This isn’t the first time Petro has weighed in on this issue. Last month, Petro took to social media to accuse Trump of murder after a military strike on a Colombian vessel, claiming that the September attack had killed a lifelong fisherman. “U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Petro wrote.

Petro has emerged as an outspoken critic of Trump and his administration, as the U.S. president has called him “an illegal drug leader” and cut off foreign aid to Colombia. At the United Nations earlier this year, Petro compared Trump to Hitler. Last week, during the COP30 climate talks in Belém, Brazil, Petro joined other world leaders in rebuking the absent Trump, saying: “Mr. Trump is against humankind.”

Democrats had previously warned that Trump’s boat strikes and escalating rhetoric against Petro could cost the U.S. one of its main allies in the Western hemisphere.

About a dozen Fannie Mae watchdogs were fired right as they were investigating whether Trump official Bill Pulte illegally obtained the mortgage records of indicted New York Attorney General and Trump administration target Letitia James.

At the time, Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or FHFA, attributed the firings to the team focusing too much on diversity, equity, and inclusion. But new information revealed by The Wall Street Journal Tuesday suggests the removals were both cover for Pulte and punishment for the watchdogs simply doing their jobs.

The ethics and investigations group had gotten internal complaints asserting that senior Fannie Mae officials had improperly ordered staff to access the mortgage records of James and other prominent Democrats. The group sent their findings to the FHFA’s Office of the Inspector General, which then gave it to the U.S. attorney’s office in eastern Virginia. That office is under the leadership of former Trump defense attorney Lindsey Halligan, who received a bar complaint on Tuesday.

Once Halligan got her hands on it, the watchdog staffers were fired, including Chief Ethics Officer Suzanne Libby. General Counsel Danielle McCoy resigned after being forced out by leadership.

The weak fraud indictment against James accuses her of committing mortgage fraud in order to get a better loan rate when she bought a home in Virginia in 2023. Prosecutors claimed that James violated that loan agreement by renting the property out. James had called the indictment baseless, and the evidence is backing her up.

This would be a massive scandal in any other administration if true. But this is President Trump, so it’s just a normal Tuesday.

National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett was optimistic about inflation under the Trump administration—even after he was fact-checked live.

“We’re comfortable that inflation has come way down, the 5 percent on average for Joe Biden, it’s probably a little less than half of that right now, and the trajectory is really, really, really good if you look at it. And inflation is one of those things that has a lot of momentum … and the momentum right now is headed towards the Fed’s target,” Hassett said in a CNBC interview Tuesday with Carl Quintanilla.

Then Quintanilla brought him back down to earth: “Even though it’s been increasing for five months, as of September?”

Hassett tried to explain away the fluctuation. “I guess if you look at it from January, there’s ups and downs, and seasonals.”

The NEC director is technically right that inflation is lower than it was, on average, under Biden—though comparing a four-year average that included the Covid-19 pandemic with less than a year of Trump’s presidency doesn’t seem incredibly illustrative.

As Quintanilla said, inflation increased every month from May to September. (We don’t yet have data for the month of October, thanks to the government shutdown.) It is currently around 3 percent, the same as it was in January before Trump assumed office.

It might be excusable that Hassett is choosing to see the situation through rose-colored glasses if Trump hadn’t been lying about the economy nonstop, from saying that grocery prices are down (they’re not), to saying that inflation is at only 2 percent (it’s not), to saying that he inherited the “highest inflation rate in the history of our country” (he didn’t).

President Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement crackdown has hit a disgusting new low, after federal agents reportedly pepper-sprayed a 1-year-old in Chicago and then lied about it.

Rafael Veraza, 25, claimed at a press conference Sunday that federal agents had deployed chemical agents on him and his family—including his young daughter—as they attempted to avoid an immigration raid at a Sam’s Club in Cicero, a Chicago suburb, the day before.

A video shared to X by Gregory Royal Pratt, an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, showed the incident and its aftermath. In one clip filmed from the inside of Veraza’s car, a large black truck sped in the opposite direction to the family. As the truck passed, the people inside appeared to spray a substance through the driver’s window of Veraza’s car, and the driver started rubbing his eyes.

Another clip showed the family out of the car, as Veraza’s wife, Evelyn, wiped her crying daughter’s face. “This is what ICE does. This is what these terrorists do to babies,” said a voice off-screen.

At the press conference Sunday, Veraza said he hadn’t noticed his daughter, who was sitting in the back seat, had been exposed to the chemicals until his wife instructed him to pull the car over. He said his daughter struggled to open her eyes and appeared to have labored breathing.

“We’re not protesters. We were not even attacking them,” Veraza said.

The Department of Homeland Security flatly denied Veraza’s account and the video evidence to the contrary. “DHS LAW ENFORCEMENT DOES NOT PEPPER SPRAY CHILDREN,” the agency wrote on X Monday afternoon.

“Here are the FACTS: during an operation rioters began throwing objects at agents and blocking the road. This did NOT occur in a Sam’s Club parking lot. Border Patrol deployed crowd control measures, and safely cleared the area,” the post read. “When rioters impede law enforcement operations they are putting officers, themselves, and others in danger.”

The statement did nothing to explain why agents would use crowd-control measures on a vehicle that was driving away from the area. The DHS has routinely provided false or misleading accounts of excessive force used by law enforcement. The agency’s statements have omitted essential details about arrests, contradicted witness testimony, and in one case, even gotten every single detail wrong.

This isn’t the first allegation that the DHS used chemical irritants on children. Just a few weeks ago, agents allegedly tear-gassed a group of children on their way to a Halloween parade.

Last week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction barring the use of force against protesters “unless such force is objectively necessary to stop an immediate threat,” citing a systemic use of force that “shocks the conscience.” In her ruling, the judge slammed Border Protection Commander Gregory Bovino, who reportedly led the aggressive operation Saturday, for lying about his own use of force against protesters.

The injunction requires officers to issue two clear warnings before administering crowd-control measures, to place identifiers conspicuously on their person, and to wear a body camera. In the video, it appears that no warnings were given as agents deployed irritants into the car and then continued driving.

The Trump administration has asked for a stay on the judge’s order while it files for appeal, so may continue its reign of terror on Chicago residents—including those in diapers.

Watchdog organization Campaign for Accountability has filed a bar complaint against Lindsey Halligan, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan is currently leading the president’s retaliatory prosecutions against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Halligan is also one of Trump’s former defense attorneys.

“CfA asked the Florida and Virginia Bars to investigate Interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan,” the organization wrote on X on Tuesday. “By using the power of her office to prosecute Former FBI Director James Comey and New York AG Letitia James despite a dearth of evidence, Halligan may have violated myriad bar rules.”

The complaint also highlights Halligan’s Signal messages to Lawfare journalist Anna Bowers last month, arguing that they’re a clear violation of Virginia Bar rules, as well as the Federal Records Act.

“Screenshots of Ms. Halligan’s texts indicate she had ‘set disappearing message time to 8 hours.’ In other words, each message Ms. Halligan sent and each message she received would automatically disappear from her device 8 hours after she sent it. Ms. Halligan was clearly aware that her messages would autodelete. After Ms. Bower reached out to DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs, Ms. Halligan texted Ms. Bower that ‘the whole convo is off the record. There’s disappearing messages and it’s on signal.’ It therefore appears Ms. Halligan was using Signal deliberately because records would not be preserved,” the complaint reads.

“Making the proactive decision to use a message app that does not preserve records for the purpose of an official conversation regarding Ms. Halligan’s actions as Interim U.S. Attorney appears to be a flagrant violation of the FRA. Ms. Halligan’s actions in contacting a journalist through Signal, setting her messages to disappear in 8 hours and retroactively claiming the exchange was off the record in an effort to secretly influence media coverage of the James case appears a deliberate violation of the FRA and, therefore, a violation of RCP 8.4(b).”

The 17-page complaint then calls for investigations into Halligan’s Bar license in both Virginia and Florida. Read it in full here.

The Trump administration has declared that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism is illegal, which could force the agency to close in the coming months when it runs out of cash, reported Politico.

Normally, the CFPB is funded using money from the “combined earnings” of the Federal Reserve—but Republicans, in an attempt to defund the agency, have been putting forth an argument to interpret “combined earnings” as profit. The Justice Department said in a legal memo that since the Fed has no surplus cash, it can’t transfer any money to the CFPB.

This is the latest tactic in an ongoing effort by Republicans and the Trump administration to dismantle the agency.

The CFPB was created after the 2008 recession in order to protect consumers from the kinds of predatory, risky lending practices that contributed to the crash. At a time when more and more Americans are falling into debt and struggling to keep up with their loan payments, the loss of the CFPB would remove oversight from lenders.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the mastermind behind the fight to eliminate the CFPB: In February, he requested $0 from the Fed to fund the CFPB, not arguing that the funding was illegal as the administration is now, but rather that the agency just didn’t need the funds. He’s also fighting in court for the ability to suspend 90 percent of CFPB staff.

Without funding, the agency “anticipates exhausting its currently available funds in early 2026,” it said in the court filing.