DOJ Tries to Kill Lawsuit Against Trump’s Ballroom After Shooting

The White House is already using Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to try and get a lawsuit against President Trump’s ballroom dropped.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche posted a letter on X Sunday night to lawyers for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is suing to stop the ballroom’s construction. The letter demands the organization dismiss its “frivolous lawsuit,” claiming the shooting proved the necessity of the ballroom as a “safe space.”

“Yesterday’s assassination attempt on President Trump proves, yet again, that the White House ballroom is essential for the safety and security of the President, his family, his cabinet, and his staff,” the letter, signed by Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, states.

“Put simply, your lawsuit helps put the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk. I hope yesterday’s narrow miss will help you finally realize the folly of a lawsuit that literally serves no purpose except to stop President Trump no matter the cost,” the letter added.

Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning about how “what happened last night is exactly the reason that our great Military, Secret Service, Law Enforcement and, for different reasons, every President for the last 150 years, have been DEMANDING that a large, safe, and secure Ballroom be built ON THE GROUNDS OF THE WHITE HOUSE.”

It’s almost astonishing at how quickly the administration came up with this excuse for the ballroom, trivializing an actual assassination attempt on the president and top Cabinet officials. Just hours after the shooting, some of the president’s most fervent MAGA supporters were posting about the need for a ballroom for the safety of the president and the first family, giving fodder to conspiracy theorists.

Their argument is hollow: This wasn’t a White House event, and thus, wouldn’t have been held at the White House—so no ballroom would have helped him. Moreover, the president is going to have to leave the White House grounds for events, and shouldn’t be hiding from interacting with the American people in a gilded ballroom. The idea that this bloated, ethically compromised monstrosity on the White House grounds is somehow necessary for safety reasons is a joke.

First lady Melania Trump is calling on ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel for a joke he made well before any shots were fired at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, calling the late night talk show host a “coward” whose jokes deepen “the political sickness within America.“

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn’t comedy—his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America,” she wrote Monday morning on X. “People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.”

The first lady framed her comments as if Kimmel’s joke directly contributed to the shooting Saturday. That was not the case.

“Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said at a parodied version of the dinner Thursday.

Two days later, suspected gunman Cole Allen attempted a shooting at the Correspondents’ Dinner, resulting in chaos. And while Kimmel’s joke aged poorly (just like White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s comment about “shots” being fired at the dinner), his joke wasn’t what led to Trump being in danger.

If the first lady is so upset by Kimmel’s comments, she should spend some time scrolling Truth Social—her husband was just making genocidal threats to Iran last month.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner devolved into a chaotic scene Saturday after a gunman rushed past security. Afterward, multiple current and former law enforcement agents told MS NOW that there were three glaring security issues that may have made this possible.  

First was the reliance on a single security checkpoint. Fox News’s Bill Melugin recounted how he entered the Washington Hilton by simply flashing his ticket. To enter a pre-party at the venue, guests did not have to present identification or submit to security screenings. 

“Only once it was time to get into the main ballroom for the dinner did we pass through magnetometers, empty our pockets, and get a pat down. And even that checkpoint was just outside of the dinner room,” Melugin wrote on X Sunday. 

The security checkpoint was set up only a staircase away from the ballroom entrance to avoid interfering with the hotel’s other guests. Staffers at the security checkpoint weren’t paying as close attention after the dinner began, because they were not expecting additional arrivals, a current Secret Service agent told MS NOW.

Second, many of the security officials who spoke with MS NOW also voiced concerns over the apparently chaotic evacuation efforts. Why was Vice President JD Vance escorted off the stage before President Donald Trump? A Secret Service official told MS NOW that Trump’s security team believed the ballroom was safe, and took a moment to ensure an underground walkway was secure before escorting the president there. Trump admitted later that he’d intentionally slowed down his own departure. He was also seen tripping on the way out. 

WTOP News documented a staggered departure for other administration officials. Minutes after Trump fled, a security team swarmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s table. Shortly after, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche were escorted out of the room. Meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel waited for several minutes before being evacuated. 

And finally, it seems that in general, security officials questioned whether the Washington Hilton was a suitable venue for an event hosting the president of the United States and multiple Cabinet members. “Hotel guests could still come and go, no checking credentials nor physical screening outside of area, just the [magnetometers] near the ballroom,” one former Secret Service official told MS NOW. “Considering the VP and Cabinet members were there, there should have been more security.”

One former presidential detail leader told MS NOW: “I hate that venue. Too much working against you.”

The Trump administration is attempting to clear its immigration backlog by cramming the court system with MAGA-aligned “deportation judges.”

Across the country, there are 700 immigration judges tasked with handling more than three million immigration cases. The Justice Department has fired more than 100 immigration judges since Donald Trump returned to office, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. A similar number have retired.

To replace them all, the agency has opened a massive recruitment drive, offering up the specialized bench to some 140 individuals who, for the most part, have no experience practicing immigration law. Instead, some of the newly hired judges include a divorce lawyer who swore to “fight exclusively for the rights of men,” a Minnesota attorney who backed the ICE raids in Minneapolis that resulted in two U.S. citizens being killed by federal agents, and a judge who denied humanitarian protection to a Serbian immigrant because he didn’t look “overtly gay.”

These people are being installed following “completely inadequate and highly biased” training, Christopher Day, a former immigration judge, told Congress in March.

Former judges said that the hiring process, historically, could take months or even years. Their training involved five weeks observing court hearings, participating in mock trials, and practicing cases alongside their mentors before judging cases on their own. The National Association of Immigration Judges told the Post that the DOJ has since cut training down to three weeks.

Ex-judges who were forced out claim that the administration is attempting to excise dissent from the judiciary, singling out those who have ruled against the government, reported the Post.

“They’re trying to create a malleable workforce that will do what they want without question,” Kerry Doyle, an ICE official turned immigration judge, told the paper. She was hired under Joe Biden and fired last year before her tenure even began. “That’s what I think the goal is.”

The Trump administration has made mass deportation a cornerstone of its immigration agenda, repeatedly pledging to deport as many as one million people per year while Trump is in office. Under ex–Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Justice Department massively reallocated its resources toward arresting and prosecuting noncriminal immigrants, dropping tens of thousands of criminal probes in the process.

Much to the chagrin of Trump’s supporters, the actual exit numbers have been lagging. In a December memo, the Department of Homeland Security revealed that it had deported some 605,000 individuals since Trump’s return, a figure that it artificially fluffed by claiming that DHS law enforcement had also encouraged 1.9 million people to “voluntarily self-deport.”

Immigration court is one of the final, legally required steps before the Trump administration can throw the people out of the country, though the administration seems content to ignore the limitations of the law. Instead, the DOJ has attempted to ram cases through the system in an attempt to meet the White House’s demands, placing an enormous and unusual burden on America’s judges.

Six federal judges were fired just this month for prioritizing the law over the White House agenda. At least two had ruled against high-profile deportation cases in the last year.

The Justice Department’s rightward shift into the MAGA agenda has sparked concern among those in the legal community, who have argued that the agency’s recent politicization has undermined public confidence in immigration courts altogether. Some attorneys have expressed concern that even individuals who are likely to be granted asylum might avoid participating in the system, ironically avoiding the process of becoming documented for fear of being deported at the courthouse.

“It sends a message that: Don’t trust these courts,” Muzaffar A. Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told the Post. “That is not good for the immigrants, it’s not good for the rule of law, and it’s not good for the ultimate integrity and reputation of our court system.”

The Supreme Court has given the Texas GOP a gerrymandering victory—just one week after the Democratic gerrymandering victory at the polls in Virginia. 

In a 6–3 decision along ideological lines on Monday, the Supreme Court reversed a lower district court ruling that blocked Republican redistricting efforts in Texas and reinstated a map designed to help Republicans add more seats to Congress. This new map could potentially flip five Texas House seats from blue to red, which could help Republicans maintain their paper-thin majority in the midterms.  

The party that freaked out and called foul after Virginia’s redistricting referendum will now celebrate its own victory—although it’s unclear how much it will really help them given President Donald Trump’s massively unpopular tenure.