DOJ Makes Major Blunder in One of Trump’s Revenge Cases

The Department of Justice rescinded a number of subpoenas Monday, just days after they were issued as part of the agency’s nascent perjury case against former CIA Director John Brennan.

Over the weekend, prosecutors issued subpoenas requiring witnesses to testify before a grand jury in Washington. This came as a surprise to some veteran prosecutors, as witnesses will typically be interviewed by the FBI before they are brought before a grand jury, according to The New York Times.  

The DOJ did not offer an explanation for the rescission Monday. Law enforcement indicated that they had opted to schedule voluntary interviews instead. 

Last week, Maria Medetis Long, chief of the national security section for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, was removed from the investigation after she reportedly expressed doubts about the probe. The department then brought in Joseph diGenova, a Trump loyalist who has been outspoken about Brennan’s alleged guilt, to take over the case. He was sworn in on Monday, so it’s unclear whether he was involved in the decision to issue subpoenas. 

The prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida are looking into allegations that Brennan lied to Congress about his role in crafting an intelligence assessment about Russian efforts to interfere on Donald Trump’s behalf in the 2016 presidential election. The U.S. attorney’s office in southern Florida has already issued 30 subpoenas as part of a sprawling conspiracy investigation into Trump’s perceived political enemies. Those cases are set to land on the desk of the same judge who handed the president a get-out-of-jail free card: Aileen Cannon.

This sudden rescission is part of a wider trend of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps by Trump’s Department of Justice, undermining numerous civil and criminal cases. 

Justin Sun, a Chinese national accused of fraud who invested $45 million in President Trump’s crypto firm after his election victory, is now suing the shady venture, which he says is “on the brink of collapse.” 

Sun’s lawsuit alleges that the company unjustifiably froze all of his tokens, blocking him from voting on any proposals, and threatened to burn them. 

Sun noted that he remains an “ardent supporter of President Trump and his Administration’s efforts to make America crypto friendly,” regardless of the lawsuit, even asserting that Trump might not have known, and would have blocked the move if he did.  

“I have tried in good faith to resolve this situation with the World Liberty project team without resorting to litigation. But the project team has refused my requests to unfreeze my tokens and restore my rights as a token holder. They have left me with no choice but to turn to the courts,” he wrote Tuesday on X. 

Sun’s lawsuit also alleges “criminal extortion,” claiming that World Liberty attempted to force ⁠Sun to mint and push its dollar-pegged stablecoin, USD1, on his TRON blockchain network. When Sun refused their advances, WLF retaliated against him, the lawsuit states. WLF has yet to comment. 

This isn’t Sun’s first time dipping his toe into the waters of questionable crypto investment schemes. In 2023, he was charged with marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a cryptocurrency token “through extensive wash trading,” which, as Popular Information puts it, is “the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership.” He was also charged with paying B-list celebrities like Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, and Lindsey Lohan to endorse his crypto token “without disclosing their compensation.” But that all went away when Trump came back into office and asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to end the case. Now it seems like Sun is getting a taste of his own medicine. 

Virginians voted Tuesday to redraw their state’s congressional map, approving a ballot measure to give Democrats as many as four additional seats. Republicans are flipping their lids.

Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham called the result a “Total travesty!!” on X, while MAGA pundit Juanita Broaddrick said, “No fucking way this is legit.” Right-wing troll Phillip Buchanan, known as Catturd on X, said, “What a fcking joke.”

Republican politicians also went into hysterics, with House Speaker Mike Johnson accusing Democrats of showing “how far they will go to break the law, ‘wage warfare,’ and disenfranchise millions of voters in order to force their unwanted, radical agenda down the throats of every American.”

Former Trump Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin took a shot at President Obama, who had thanked Virginia voters for “showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back.”

“Disenfranchising millions of voters and forcing 45% of Virginians to be represented by 1 congressional district and 55% represented by 10 is now ‘standing up for Democracy.’ Is that ‘equity’?” McLaughlin complained on X. “What a farce.”

Islamophobe and Donald Trump confidant Laura Loomer also blamed Obama.

“Democrats are stealing Virginia, compliments of Barack Hussein,” Loomer posted. “Virginia is about to become uninhabitable.”

Conservatives started this fight last year when Trump started pushing Republican-led states to redistrict in order to save his neck from a Democratic Congress. Trump said that Texas Republicans were “entitled to five more seats,” and the state’s GOP obliged. Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio all followed suit.

Democrats fired back first in California, and now they have won a 51–49 percent vote in Virginia in a rebuke to Trump and the Republican Party. The GOP can cry disenfranchisement and gerrymandering all they want, but they have only themselves to blame, and Democrats now have a much stronger chance of retaking Congress in November’s midterm elections.

House Judiciary Democrats want to force FBI Director Kash Patel to take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test after The Atlantic reported that his drinking was “a recurring source of concern across the government.”

“There are numerous accounts that you consume alcohol to the point of illness, direct profanity-laced outbursts at support staff, and pass out drunk behind locked doors in episodes making you so unreachable that agents have had to fetch SWAT-level breaching equipment to awaken you,” the Democrats wrote in a letter to Patel on Tuesday. “These glimpses of your relationship to alcohol would be alarming to see in an FBI agent; for us to see them in the FBI Director himself is shocking and indicative of a public emergency.”

The Atlantic article is pretty damning. A litany of sources detailed Patel’s excessive drinking in private clubs across the country with White House staff, which often led him to push meetings for his hangovers and in one instance even forced the FBI to request SWAT-level “breaching equipment” because he was unresponsive behind a locked door. Patel of course has denied all of these allegations, stating that he’d never been drunk on the job and filing a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic.

Patel has yet to respond to House Judiciary Democrats’ demand, which had a deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday.

Do Donald Trump’s legal prosecutors know what they’re doing? According to the chief of staff for the former top MAGA prosecutor in the country: No, they really don’t.

As part of an article on Todd Blanche’s time as acting attorney general, CNN asked Chad Mizelle, Pam Bondi’s former chief of staff, why her “Weaponization Working Group”—which tried to investigate former government prosecutors Trump believed were politically motivated—never produced anything substantial.

“Part of the reason the weaponization work has been difficult is that you need people who are MAGA and who are really competent,” Mizelle said. “Many career prosecutors are not interested in this kind of work. It’s a very small group of people.”

Presumably this was said without a whiff of irony. The quote is a perfect encapsulation of one of the few joys one can take from our present political situation: Trump’s staff is simply too dumb to carry out most of their assignments.

Harmeet Dhillon, another Trump prosecutor who recently lost her fifth consecutive case trying to acquire a state’s voter rolls, gave CNN another doozy: “There are many prosecutors out there who are opposed to the president’s agenda and are not interested in doing the kinds of cases that are important to the White House.” Hmm, I wonder why.

Trump has weaponized the Department of Justice like no president before, using it almost exclusively to attack political enemies. CNN reports that doing this kind of work “took a toll on Bondi, who sources said believed that she was at times being asked to do the impossible.”

In fact, Bondi may have been unceremoniously fired because Trump believed she was going too soft on his enemies.

Bondi’s biggest failure in the eyes of the public was her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, in which the rollout of information on the convicted sex trafficker was repeatedly delayed. She told Fox early last year that Epstein’s client list was “on her desk”—before her department backtracked and said the list never existed.

After the files were released, some victims’ names were mistakenly left visible, while key information that might have actually led to some justice being done was redacted. No one has been arrested in the U.S. for involvement in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, even with tons of publicly available documents for use as evidence. And of course, there are also 2.5 million files that have not been released yet.

Blanche is continuing the Trump administration’s targeted legal agenda, releasing a report alleging that Biden’s DOJ was biased in persecuting anti-abortion protesters, and fighting to get a few Proud Boys off the hook for their January 6, 2021, actions. But like Bondi, he has not yet successfully prosecuted a high-profile Trump opponent. Long may the ineffectualness continue.

Employees at the Department of Homeland Security are weeks away from losing their paychecks.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News Tuesday that the agency’s funding has all but run dry, 66 days into the partial government shutdown.

Donald Trump signed a memorandum earlier this month that authorized the release of $10 billion in emergency funds from the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but that money will be gone by the first week of May. Mullin noted that between DHS’s 22 agencies, the department spends roughly $1.6 billion on wages every two weeks.

“So the money is going extremely fast, and once that happens, there is no emergency funds after that,” the DHS chief told Fox. “After we get through April … I’ve got one payroll left and there is no more emergency funds, so the president can’t do another executive order for us to use money because there’s no more money there.”

The only solution, according to Mullin, is for Congress to pass another funding bill. Republicans and Democrats have been in a stalemate for months, unable to reach a bipartisan consensus on how to fund DHS without tackling the myriad recent abuses by two of the department’s subagencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

Shortly after federal agents killed Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Democrats demanded 10 reforms to the two agencies as a prerequisite for ongoing funding negotiations. Those demands included line items that required agents to identify themselves, take off their masks, and obtain judicial warrants before forcing their way onto private property. Republicans refused.

The conservative caucus, however, is attempting to put forward a new funding package that would address DHS’s financial straits without diverting additional funds toward ICE and CBP. Last year, the two agencies independently received a total of $170 billion in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”—more than five times their 2024 allotment.

President Trump announced an indefinite extension to his ceasefire with Iran Tuesday as it became evident that peace talks between the two countries were on the brink of collapse.

“Based on the fact that the Government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so and, upon the request of Field Marshal Asim Munir, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, of Pakistan, we have been asked to hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I have therefore directed our Military to continue the Blockade and, in all other respects, remain ready and able, and will therefore extend the Ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.”

The announcement came shortly after Vice President JD Vance suspended his travel plans to Islamabad Tuesday to represent the United States at the table. One source told The Wall Street Journal that Vance pulled out because Iranian negotiators hadn’t committed to showing up to the meeting. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei confirmed as much, telling Iranian state broadcaster IRIB that the meeting was called off due to “contradictory messages, inconsistent behavior and unacceptable actions by the American side.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi added that the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is an “act of war” and a violation of the ceasefire.

Trump has previously noted that the United States is prepared to simply continue bombing Iran again if no deal is reached, but his latest announcement shows he may be ready to admit he doesn’t hold all the cards here. Meanwhile, the U.S. has accomplished nothing since the war began, as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and the Iranian government remains unwilling to concede on its enriched uranium.

This story has been updated.

Florida became the first state to criminally investigate an AI model on Tuesday, and Attorney General James Uthmeier’s charges could lead to big changes in how the technology is regulated.

Uthmeier, a Republican, launched a criminal probe into ChatGPT and its parent company, OpenAI, following a mass shooting at Florida State University that took place in April 2025.

Two people died, and six others were injured in the shooting, including at least one student. All of those injured have since been released from hospital, and the suspect, 20-year-old FSU student Phoenix Ikner, is in custody.

Prosecutors reviewed Ikner’s devices and claimed he spoke to the chatbot extensively. While Ikner does not appear to have been driven into “AI psychosis,” as some mentally unstable individuals have, he allegedly talked to the chatbot multiple times about the shooting.

ChatGPT “offered significant advice to the shooter before he committed such heinous crimes,” Uthmeier said. One message involved the suspect quizzing ChatGPT about a gun’s power at close range, and which ammunition was needed to load it.

On the day of the crime, Ikner allegedly asked the chatbot how America would react to a shooting at Florida State, and when the most crowded time was at the student union, the area of the campus where the shooting took place.

“If this were a person on the other end of the screen, we would be charging them with murder,” Uthmeier said at a press conference.

While Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis isn’t exactly a favorite of the left, he has been at the forefront of state AI regulation. DeSantis has asked the state legislature to come up with legal AI guardrails in a special session next week.

But the country’s executive branch has taken the opposite stance. President Donald Trump has pushed to deregulate AI and force states to comply with federal policy. We’ll see which GOP sect ends up victorious, but Florida’s leadership on the issue is a welcome development.

The U.S. has significantly depleted its missile reserve during its war with Iran, sparking concerns that the military could be caught empty-handed if another conflict arises in the next few years.

The Pentagon has used at least 45 percent of its Precision Strike Missile stockpile, at least half of its THAAD missiles, and nearly 50 percent of its Patriot air defense interceptor missiles, according to a report published Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The number of missiles that remain are expected to be enough to continue the war in Iran, even if peace negotiations fall apart, but they are too diminished to thwart another major world power, such as China.

“The high munitions expenditures have created a window of increased vulnerability in the western Pacific,” Mark Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel and a CSIS report author, told CNN. “It will take one to four years to replenish these inventories and several years after that to expand them to where they need to be.”

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told CNN that the military “has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

“Since President Trump took office, we have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests,” Parnell said.

The war with Iran is currently in its seventh week, but Defense Department officials first raised concerns about America’s missile supply more than a month ago. In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers on March 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted. One source told CNN in early March that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles in order to fend off the drones.

Shortly afterward, European Union defense officials warned that the U.S. would no longer be capable of supplying missiles to its allies amid the war with Iran, stressing that the continent would need to develop its own missile manufacturing sector in order to adequately fill its supply without Washington’s help.

But the reality has not aligned with the White House’s rhetoric. Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. has a “virtually unlimited” supply of missiles, capable of attacking Iran “forever.” Nonetheless, his administration has placed orders with private contractors in order to replenish America’s stockpiles, though some weapons reserves are expected to take years before they return to prewar levels.

Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego should be commended for some excellent fact-checking of Trump crony Kevin Warsh on Tuesday.

Warsh is Trump’s pick to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve after Jerome Powell’s term expires in May. During Warsh’s Senate committee confirmation hearing, Gallego tried to suss out whether Warsh was going to put the president’s political interests ahead of the country’s economic health.

“Earlier today, you said to Senator [John] Kennedy that President Trump never demanded you to cut interest rates in your job interview. Is that your sworn testimony?” Gallego asked.

“That is, Senator,” Warsh said.

“Well, someone here is lying, then,” Gallego replied. “It’s either you or President Trump. Because in an interview with The Wall Street Journal of December 12, President Trump confirmed he pressed you on your commitment to support interest rate cuts.”

Gallego helpfully cited the Journal article for Warsh: “During a 45-minute meeting … the president pressed Warsh on whether he could trust him to support interest-rate cuts if he were chosen to lead the central bank, according to people familiar with the meeting. Trump, in the Journal interview, confirmed that reporting.”

Warsh responded by claiming the reporters who wrote the story—Meridith McGraw, Nick Timiraos, and Brian Schwartz—were fibbing:

“Senator, there’s, of course, a third alternative. You cite a couple of reporters for a leading financial newspaper.… I think those reporters either need better sources, or better journalistic standards.”

Of course, the cited “source” here is Trump himself, which Gallego pointed out, asking if that meant Warsh thought Trump was lying. Warsh began to reply before Gallego unfortunately cut him off and moved on. Gallego did ask Warsh what he would say if the Journal verified all of its reporting, to which Warsh repeated the same unsatisfying point about journalists needing better sources and standards.

Warsh has previously worked on Wall Street, as an economic adviser in the George W. Bush administration, and as a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011. With a net worth in the hundreds of millions, he would be the richest Fed chair ever, which feels fitting for a presidency that seems to be about the rich laughing in the face of working Americans as much as possible.

Trump would love to see a Powell replacement as soon as possible. Trump appointed the mild-mannered, bespectacled Powell in 2017, but Powell has since drawn the president’s ire by being boringly responsible and refusing to cut interest rates. Trump has even weaponized the Department of Justice by subpoenaing Powell over a federal building renovation (a judge tossed the lawsuit out).

In the face of mounting pressure, Powell has not wavered. His quiet resistance to the president has made him something of a cult hero among Democrats, who have crafted a few social media fancams in his honor.