DOJ Resurrects War With Law Firms Despite Major Legal Blows

The Trump administration is going to defend the president’s executive orders targeting law firms one day after apparently deciding to stop the fight in court. 

Administration lawyers asked an appeals court Monday if it could pull back from appealing its losses to the law firms. But the next morning, The New York Times reports, the Department of Justice suddenly flip-flopped, emailing the four law firms fighting the orders that it would file a motion to withdraw its dismissal.  

President Trump’s executive orders sought to prevent law firms that went against him from doing business with the government, and threatened their clients with the loss of government contracts. While some firms capitulated, such as Skadden and Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey decided to challenge the orders in court. 

The firms notched several victories, with judges ruling in favor of WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, Susman Godfrey, and Jenner & Block in multiple rulings. Until Tuesday, the administration was going to back down in the face of these losses, but then changed its mind. It’s not clear why the Trump administration decided to reverse course, or if the court will let the DOJ undo its dismissal. 

An unnamed administration official told the Times that the White House Counsel’s Office was discussing the next course of action. Did Trump himself personally intervene, or is the DOJ and White House not on the same page? 

This story has been updated. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem crumbled Tuesday when confronted about smearing Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse who was shot and killed by federal immigration agents earlier this year.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar said that Noem calling Pretti a “domestic terrorist” was “one of the most hurtful things” his parents said they could ever imagine.

“Do you have anything you want to say to Alex Pretti’s parents about their son?” Klobuchar asked.

Rather than apologize, a wide-eyed Noem launched into a typical public relations response, claiming she’d relied on information from agents and couldn’t “even imagine” what Pretti’s parents had gone through.

Klobuchar continued to press Noem to give a real answer.

“Sir, I di—ma’am, I did not call him a domestic terrorist,” Noem replied. “I said it appeared to be an incident of.”

Klobuchar scoffed. “I think the parents saw it for what it was,” she replied.

Just hours after Pretti was shot and killed, Noem gave a press conference where she claimed he had committed an “act of domestic terrorism.” She also falsely claimed that Pretti had brandished a weapon, intending “to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” A surplus of video evidence and a review by U.S. Customs and Border Protection found that Pretti had done no such thing.

A number of Trump administration officials quickly attempted to walk back the secretary’s baseless claims, but the damage was already done.

Klobuchar wasn’t the only lawmaker to confront Noem with her false claims about Pretti: Louisiana Senator John Kennedy called out the secretary for trying to push the blame onto White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Kennedy read aloud from a January report by Axios that quoted Noem’s comments to a person familiar with her remarks. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” the Republican recounted Noem saying.

“Sir, I did not do that,” Noem claimed, and dismissed the comment because it came from an article that relied on anonymous sources. Little over a month after Pretti’s killing, and Noem still appears unwilling to take accountability for spreading dangerous misinformation.

On Tuesday, Israel bombed Iran’s Council of Experts while it was in the process of choosing a new supreme leader. That same day, it was reported that President Trump is open to supporting armed militias in the region. 

These two events seem to indicate that Trump has entered phase two of his regime-change plan in Iran, and, unlike in Venezuela, will not be working with the existing apparatus to do so. 

Israel stated that the council bombing occurred while votes for the next supreme leader were being counted by its 88 members. There is no casualty count at the time of this writing.  

“We wanted to prevent them from picking a new supreme leader,” an Israel Defense Forces official told Axios.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump spoke with Kurds and other local factions, and may potentially support them in their efforts to fill the massive leadership gap that Israel and the U.S. are attempting to create in Tehran. It’s not clear whether the leaders were based in Iran or in neighboring countries.

“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump said on Sunday. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”

FBI Director Kash Patel didn’t want the bureau’s forensic experts examining the scene of Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis because he didn’t want her referred to as a “victim” in the warrant, according to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In a post on X, the senators said that a “credible whistleblower” disclosed Patel’s reasoning for ordering agents not to investigate Good’s death. Instead, Patel wanted “to portray her as the subject of an investigation into the assault of a federal law enforcement officer.”

It’s a shocking revelation, suggesting that in the initial hours and days after Good was shot and killed, the Trump administration was already trying to exonerate itself and create its own narrative.

It’s well established that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension attempted to investigate Good’s killing on its own, only to be immediately shut out by the FBI. Now we know why the FBI was holding off on a civil rights investigation of Good’s death: The Trump administration wanted to brand Good as some kind of insurrectionist or terrorist.

That accusation didn’t stick, and would set off mass protests in Minneapolis against Operation Metro Surge. Good’s killing would be followed by that of nurse Alex Pretti, who similarly was branded a terrorist by the White House. Ultimately, federal prosecutors in the state would resign en masse over the administration’s handling of the two deaths, as well as their immigration strategy overall.

It’s obvious now that Patel’s action failed to convince the public that ICE was in the right when agent Jonathan Ross decided to shoot her. In fact, it’s a major reason why the immigration agency is so unpopular with Americans and why many people want to see the agency abolished. But all of that is falling on deaf ears in the White House.

The six American service members killed in an Iranian drone attack in Kuwait reportedly received no counter-rocket, artillery, and mortar defense; didn’t get the drone defense systems they asked for; didn’t hear the warning sirens in time; and were in a makeshift office based out of a trailer that there were concerns about using.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth initially claimed that the soldiers were killed when a “squirter” missile made it through the defenses of a fortified base.

“You have air defenses, and a lot’s coming in, and you hit most of it,” Hegseth said Monday at the Pentagon. “Every once in a while, you might have one, unfortunately, we call it a squirter, that makes its way through. And in that particular case, it happened to hit a tactical operations center that was fortified, but these are powerful weapons.”

But three anonymous military officials told CBS News that the base at the Shuaiba port in Kuwait, where the troops were killed, wasn’t just unfortified, it wasn’t a base at all—it was a triple-wide trailer surrounded by four concrete walls. They claimed that the trailer was struck directly from above and engulfed in flames. Two of the three officials also said they didn’t hear any of the warning sirens that were supposed to go off, even though the siren had been functioning properly for days prior. There was also no rocket defense system that could prevent the attack.

It becomes clearer with each passing day that this war is being waged on the fly by individuals whose lust for militancy supersedes any kind of measured, planned action. And if these officials’ reports are true, Americans are getting killed because of it.