DOJ Flouts Court Order on Trump’s Illegally Installed Attorney

The Justice Department is still signing criminal indictments with Lindsey Halligan’s name—almost a day after a judge ruled that she was unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney.

Federal prosecutors were initially instructed to sign court filings in the name of Halligan’s first assistant, after U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie concluded Monday that Halligan had no authority to preside over the Eastern District of Virginia since she was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate. But just an hour later, internal emails instructed the department to continue using Halligan’s name, labeling Currie’s decision “premature,” reported MS NOW’s Lisa Rubin.

The move is a flagrant violation of Currie’s court order, which threw out Donald Trump’s cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“Ms. Halligan has been unlawfully serving in that role since September 22, 2025,” Currie wrote in her opinion. “All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment … constitute unlawful exercises of executive power and must be set aside.”

Currie tossed the case “without prejudice,” giving Trump a potential pathway to try the cases again on the same charges should he legally replace Halligan.

Trump handpicked Halligan—a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience—to replace the last attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Siebert, had refused to prosecute Comey and James after he couldn’t find incriminating evidence against the pair.

Halligan was sworn in to the powerful position in September. Ignoring protocol, the Trump loyalist moved full steam ahead on prosecutions under the banner of Trump’s approval for months, despite the fact that she was never confirmed by the Senate.

Border Protection Commander Gregory Bovino made several wild attempts to dodge questions while testifying about his excessive use of force against protesters in Chicago.

In a 223-page injunction ruling last week, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis slammed Bovino over his “evasive” testimony, claiming that he’d only responded to questions with “cute” answers or by “outright lying.” A look at the transcript of Bovino’s testimony, newly released on Monday, revealed just how bad things got during his deposition.

While discussing a video of him deploying chemical irritants on protesters in the Little Village neighborhood—which he admitted to having lied about—Bovino played dumb and became combative.

“Is C.S. gas commonly known as tear gas?” asked the interviewer.

“I don’t know, I—I don’t refer to it that way,” Bovino replied, though C.S. gas is one of the most commonly used tear gases in the world.

When asked whether he would admit to throwing a canister of tear gas on that particular day, in that particular location, Bovino said he would deny it.

“You said canister—I threw two. That’s plural,” Bovino replied. As the interviewer attempted to rephrase the question, Bovino continued to argue over the semantics.

Bovino had also previously claimed he had been hit in the head by a rock before deploying chemical irritants, but in his deposition said he’d been “mistaken.”

“The white rock was thrown at me, but that was after I deployed less lethal means in chemical munitions. I was mixed up with several other objects in a very chaotic environment. And I confused that white rock with other objects that were thrown at me,” he said.

Bovino repeatedly played dumb when asked about potential misconduct committed by federal agents under his command during “Operation Midway Blitz.”

When asked about the details of a video of the ICE processing center in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago, that he said he’d watched in preparation for the deposition, Bovino said: “I can’t recall the details of that video that I looked at.”

When further pressed, he confirmed that “there were figures in the video,” before again saying, “I can’t remember.”

Later, when the interviewer asked whether Bovino was “responsible for ensuring that [CBP agents] complied with the law,” the CBP chief replied, “I’m responsible for them to do what now?”

When asked about an incident where agents deployed tear gas in Irving Park as parents and children departed their homes for a Halloween parade, Bovino claimed that the actions of agents “were justified if that happened.” But he maintained that he did not review any video of the incident, speak with any agents involved, or recall reading any reports on the incident.

Republican Senator Jim Justice and his wife didn’t pay his taxes, and now have to pay the IRS $5 million. 

On Monday, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Justice and his wife, Cathy, seeking  $5,164,739.75 in unpaid federal income taxes as of August. The debt goes all the way back to 2009, and includes accrued interest and penalties. So Justice and his wife cut a deal to pay back the IRS.

Justice served two terms as West Virginia’s governor, being elected as a Democrat in 2016 before switching parties the next year. After serving two terms, he was elected U.S. senator for West Virginia in 2024. He made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the sale of coal mines in 2009, vaulting him to the Forbes list of billionaires, which he stayed on until 2021. 

But during that time, Justice was racking up debt in the form of personally guaranteed bank loans, court judgments, and environmental liabilities. In 2016, The Washington Post reported that he had unpaid bills and fines to coal regulators and suppliers, and by January of this year, Forbes magazine reported that his liabilities had exceeded his assets. 

Last month, the IRS filed a tax lien against Justice and his wife, saying they owed more than $8 million. Justice claimed at the time that the charges were politically motivated. Now it seems he has to admit defeat.  

The GOP is finally being honest about why it’s itching for military intervention in Venezuela. Shocker—it wasn’t about the drugs, it was always about the oil. 

“I would love to see a change in government,” Fox News host Larry Kudlow said to Republican Representative Maria Salazar on Monday. “My wife’s from Nicaragua.… The dictators there rely on Venezuelan oil. But at the same time, a lot of Americans don’t want actual U.S. participation in regime change in Venezuela. They would much prefer the Venezuelans to do it on their own. Do you think the pressure that [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro has received will force him to leave on his own?”

“Maduro is not Fidel Castro, Maduro is not a brave boy.… He is on that very nefarious list of the terrorist organization, that the airspace above Venezuela has been closed off and the commercial airlines from the United States are not flying. He’s understanding that we’re about to go in,” Salazar replied.

She then went on to outline the top three reasons for more U.S. intervention in the Latin American country. Reason number one? Oil. 

“Venezuela—for the American oil companies—will be a field day. Because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity. American companies can go in and fix the whole oil rigs,”  she said.

Salazar continued. 

“We’re gonna be doing a favor to us, to our children, to our economy, to our oil companies, and to the Venezuelans.” 

Regardless of your issues with Maduro (and there are many), Salazar’s language here is undeniably imperialistic. It feels like it’s ripped straight from the banana republic era of Latin America, or the Bush era before the invasion of Iraq. Republicans and the Trump administration have made such a big show of bombing drug boats to save “thousands” of American lives, when they really just wanted an excuse to enact the intervention Salazar refers to. But now they’ve gone fully mask-off. 

“Wow, at least with Iraq they had the decency to try and convince the American public about weapons of mass destruction,” one X user wrote. “Now they are just straight up telling us what they really want and no one can stop them.”

A regime change would not be some chill, bloodless agreement that sees Maduro willfully stepping aside and handing over all of his country’s most valuable resource. It would most likely be met with violence that would hurt the Venezuelans more than anyone else. 

“U.S. military action could trigger a crisis on the same order as happened in Iraq after the U.S. regime change effort there,” Caracas-based International Crisis Group senior analyst Phil Gunson told The New Republic. “If the U.S. does decapitate the government, the multiple armed actors could bring about a degree of anarchy. None of these different groups have any incentive to just lay down their arms. There have been several decades of accumulated resentments on various sides, and it’s not fanciful to imagine that there could be lynchings. There could be bombings or selective assassinations.”

Salazar saying  “us,” “our children,” and “our economy,” before she even mentions the citizens of the country she wants to invade so badly tells you everything you need to know about where U.S. priorities are. 

Republican Representative Elise Stefanik is scrambling to recover her gubernatorial campaign’s messaging after President Donald Trump had a cozy meeting with her political foil, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

Stefanik’s already botched bid to become governor of New York was thrown into flux Friday after a googly-eyed Trump shut down her wildly racist claim that Mamdani was a “jihadist.” Instead, he called the mayor-elect a “very rational person” and said he would feel safe living in New York City during Mamdani’s tenure.

In an interview with News12 Monday, Stefanik doubled down anyway, saying that she and Trump would have to “agree to disagree.”

“I stand by my statement. He is a jihadist,” Stefanik said of Mamdani. “This is an area where President Trump and I disagree. But what we all want to work toward is making New York more affordable and safe, and that’s where I have a very strong record and working relationship with the administration.”

Amid a massive meltdown over the meeting, Laura Loomer, the self-described “proud Islamaphobe” with the president’s ear, noted that Trump had put Stefanik in a bad position. “Dems just need to run clips of the presser today to defeat Elise,” Loomer wrote on X Friday.

Within a matter of minutes into the joint press conference with Mamdani, Trump managed to blow up Republicans’ talking points about the incoming mayor, which might have given them a leg up in the upcoming midterm elections in 2026.

Donald Trump is on a legal losing streak.

The president’s defamation lawsuit against The Guardian fell apart Monday when a Florida judge granted motions to dismiss, crushing his latest attempt to peel money out of a media institution.

The case was brought in 2023 by Trump Media & Technology Group, or TMTG, the corporate owner of Trump’s social media platform Truth Social. It sued the British newspaper for defamation, arguing that it—as well as a local Florida daily that picked up the story—had published false statements about the financial machinations of the company.

In a March 2023 article, The Guardian reported that TMTG had accepted “$8 million” in emergency loans from shadowy entities. That included a $2 million loan from Paxum Bank, as well as $6 million from a group known as E.S. Family Trust. The paper also noted at the time that one of the trustees of E.S. Family allegedly had ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the time, prosecutors with the Southern District of New York were investigating whether the loans violated federal money-laundering laws.

“According to that report, one of the executives of TMTG floated the idea of returning the money given the lack of details and transparency about who was providing the loans. TMTG co-founder Will Wilkerson—who eventually became a whistleblower in the federal investigation—told SDNY that Chief Financial Officer Phillip Juhan was uncomfortable about the murky nature of the two entities,” reported Alternet.

But merely reporting information is not enough to fulfill the legal prerequisite in a defamation case of “actual malice” against a public figure.

Judge Hunter W. Carroll of Florida’s Twelfth Judicial Circuit granted an anti-SLAPP motion to The Guardian, a sign that the court interpreted the suit as a meritless attempt to silence criticism.

Instead, The Guardian’s reporting “was based on multiple sources familiar with the investigation, review of internal TMTG communications, investigation of the entities who made the loans, and fruitless requests for further information from the Department of Justice, the investigators’ office, and outside counsel for TMTG,” Carroll wrote in his ruling.

It was the third courtroom loss for Trump in just a handful of hours, following another decision in which a federal judge dropped the criminal indictments against former FBI Director James Comey (and by extension New York Attorney General Letitia James), deciding that the prosecutor who brought the charges in both cases—Lindsey Halligan—was not lawfully appointed.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says “all orders” from President Trump are “lawful orders,” and troops have no right to question him.

“All lawful—all orders—lawful orders are presumed to be legal by our service members. You can’t have a functioning military if there is disorder and chaos within the ranks,” Leavitt told reporters outside the White House on Monday. “And that’s what these Democrat members were encouraging. It’s very clear. And not a single one of them since they’ve been pressed by the media … can point to a single illegal order that this administration has given down because it does not exist.

“You can’t have a soldier out on the battlefield or conducting a classified order questioning whether that order is lawful or whether they should follow through,” Leavitt argued earlier, in a twisted reading of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Leavitt’s comments came as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth weighs court-martialing former astronaut, retired Naval officer, and now–Democratic Senator Mark Kelly for his role in a video that the right is claiming to be “seditious.”

“This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad but from right here at home,” Kelly said in the clip, along with Senator Elissa Slotkin and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan—all former military or intelligence veterans. “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

Kelly later responded to threats from the Department of Defense.

“In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.… I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death,” he wrote. “If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”

Unfortunately for the White House’s arguments, there have been illegal orders to the military from the Trump administration. Just last week, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard into Washington, D.C., was illegal. But Leavitt is doing what she does best: mindlessly supporting and justifying everything the president does.

Are Americans supposed to think that the Trump administration canceling the release of economics reports is somehow a good sign for the economy?

The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced Monday that it had officially canceled releasing the advance estimate on gross domestic product (GDP) for the third quarter of 2025. The Trump administration had previously delayed the release, which was initially slated for October 30, due to the government shutdown—but now it seems to have been abandoned altogether.

Last week, the Labor Department called off releasing its monthly jobs report for October, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics scrapped its own report on inflation.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed the Democrats two weeks ago for such delays, saying the liberal party “may have permanently damaged the federal statistical system.” She hinted at further cancellations, saying that data from October “will be permanently impaired.”

The Trump administration’s decision to get stingy with publishing economic data comes amid concerns that President Donald Trump’s policies aren’t all that good for the economy. Trump’s mass deportation scheme is estimated to reduce the GDP by between 4.2 to 6.8 percent, according to the American Immigration Council. Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs are also expected to place a strain on GDP, according to the Tax Foundation.

If Trump would like to argue against these assertions, then the government may want to start publishing some actual data.

The BEA has also pushed the release of another report that tracks consumer earning, spending, and saving. That report will now be released on December 5. Three other reports on economic data from 2024 “will be rescheduled.”

The Commerce Department previously published that the U.S. economy contracted 0.5 percent in the first quarter, and then grew at a rate of 3.8 in the second quarter, leaving GDP in the first half of the year with an annual growth rate of roughly 1.66 percent, according to Fox Business.

Donald Trump was all set to unveil his health care plan to the public Monday but now plans to delay it after backlash from Republicans in Congress. 

The “Healthcare Price Cuts Act,” according to MS NOW, would have included a two-year extension to Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are due to expire next month and were a sticking point in government shutdown negotiations. It would also seek to end what the White House calls “surprise premium hikes,” and would require a small minimum premium payment, eliminating the $0 premium.  

Politico reports that the plan would have limited the subsidies to people whose incomes amount to 700 percent of the federal poverty line. But Republicans on Capitol Hill are not happy with the plan, with one of them anonymously telling MS NOW, “I wasn’t expecting the proposal to be Obamacare-lite. Absolutely not supportive of extending ACA subsidies.

“I’ve talked to enough [Republicans] to know that people weren’t expecting this and aren’t happy about it,” added the member of Congress. “I don’t see how a proposal like this has any chance of getting majority Republican support. We need to be focused on health care, but extending Obamacare isn’t even serious.”

The Trump administration seems to have put together the plan without input from its allies in Congress, with Republicans telling the news outlet that they didn’t know the proposal would extend ACA subsidies. The budget deal ending the government shutdown was rejected by all but eight Democrats in the Senate because it only included the promise of a vote on the subsidies, as opposed to an outright extension. 

Trump’s plan, if adopted, would mean Democrats getting at least a partial win on ACA subsidies, albeit with significant conditions. That’s apparently too much to swallow for the GOP, so it’s anyone’s guess whether Republicans will continue struggling to come up with their own health care plan 15 years after the Democrats.   

Vice President JD Vance threw a fit Monday over Republicans criticizing President Donald Trump’s—or possibly, Vladimir Putin’s—latest scheme to give Russia everything it wants from Ukraine.

Vance fumed on social media as Republicans voiced their concerns about the latest sprawling peace plan that was essentially a “wish list” of Russia’s long-standing demands, requiring Ukraine to give up territory, reduce the size of its armed forces, and agree not to use certain weapons. He took aim in particular at Senator Mitch McConnell, who’d urged the Trump administration on Friday to “find new advisors,” warning that “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool.”

Vance slammed the 84-year-old Republican, who is planning to retire in January. “This is a ridiculous attack on the president’s team, which has worked tirelessly to clean up the mess in Ukraine that Mitch—always eager to write blank checks to Biden’s foreign policy—left us,” Vance wrote on X. “I wonder if the three candidates to replace McConnell in Kentucky share his views here.”

In another, longer post Monday, Vance criticized the “beltway GOP” for not caring enough about issues such as the cost of living, crime, or health care.

“Our administration is working hard on addressing all of these problems. But you know what really fires up the beltway GOP? Not any of the above. Instead, the political class is really angry that the Trump administration may finally bring a four year conflict in Eastern Europe to a close,” Vance wrote.

“I’m not even talking about the substance of their views. Much of what these people have said about the Ukraine war has been proven wrong, but whatever. We can agree to disagree. But the level of passion over this one issue when your own country has serious problems is bonkers,” he wrote. “It disgusts me. Show some passion for your own country.”

While Vance has doubled down on the proposed Ukraine plan, it’s still not clear where it came from. Over the weekend, a group of GOP lawmakers claimed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had admitted the outrageous plan—which appeared to be translated from Russian—wasn’t actually put forth by the United States. Two European diplomats told Axios that when they pressed the Trump administration for clarification, they were specifically told it was not a “Trump plan.”

Shortly after, Rubio publicly claimed the plan was in fact “authored by the U.S.” but also seemed to downgrade the plan to simply a “framework.”