Trump Indicts James Comey After Already Failing Once

In the latest escalation of President Donald Trump’s beef with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, the Federal Communications Commission has begun an early review of Disney’s broadcast licenses, The New York Times reported Tuesday.  

Trump’s crusade against Kimmel reignited after the television host joked last week that Melania would “glow like an expectant widow” at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Days later, a suspected gunman attempted to attack the event, launching the latest round of conservative pearl-clutching and suggestions that the gunman had gotten the idea to assassinate the president from late-night TV. 

The shooter’s supposed manifesto specifically referred to Trump’s lack of respect for Christianity, his decision to cut off funding for Ukraine, and the country being led by “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor” as primary grievances for his actions. Not Kimmel’s joke. 

But in the days after the shooting, Melania Trump, the president, and at least two members of White House staff have attacked Kimmel.

Earlier this month, FCC Chair Brandon Carr publicly suggested that Disney’s broadcast license could be in jeopardy, after launching an investigation into Disney over its alleged efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. “If the evidence does in fact play out and shows that they were engaged in race- and gender-based discrimination, that’s a very serious issue at the FCC, that could fundamentally go to their character qualifications to even hold a license,” Carr told Fox News.

Disney and ABC have previously bucked the president’s wishes by reinstalling Kimmel after he was temporarily suspended for criticizing the conservative base’s response to Charlie Kirk’s death. Carr threatened the company’s licenses then, too. Carr warned on a far-right podcast that if Disney and ABC don’t “take action on Kimmel,” they may see suspension of broadcast licenses.

This story has been updated.

The United Kingdom’s new ambassador to the United States told a group of British students visiting Washington that America’s only “special relationship” is with Israel, not the U.K. 

Sir Christian Turner’s remarks were leaked to the Financial Times, which reported the news Tuesday as King Charles III visits the U.S. this week. Turner met with the students shortly after his appointment in February, and during a Q&A with them, was asked about the U.S.-U.K. “special relationship.” He described the phrase as “quite nostalgic,” saying that “it’s quite backwards looking, and it has a lot of baggage about it.”

“I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States—and that is probably Israel,” Turner said at the event prior to the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. 

Turner also told the students that it was “extraordinary” that the fallout from the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files had “brought down a senior member of the royal family, a British ambassador to Washington, potentially the prime minister, and yet here in the U.S., it really hasn’t touched anybody.”  

Turner’s comments are surprising, but reflect reality in that Israel receives billions of dollars in U.S. aid every year. The State Department has admitted that the Iran war came at Israel’s urging, and U.S.-U.K. ties have gone up and down through the decades for many reasons, including the Iraq War, Trump’s tariffs, and the Iran war. 

Regarding Epstein, the U.S. government’s release of files related to the convicted sex offender has shaken the British government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, resulting in Turner’s predecessor, Peter Mandelson, being fired and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, then Prince Andrew, being stripped of his royal titles.

Turner’s words likely won’t come with any consequences, especially considering that Mandelson was sacked over his close ties to the notorious sex offender. But they do give an insight into what leading foreign officials think of how the U.S. is run under President Trump, and things aren’t good. 

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accidentally jeopardized the Trump administration’s entire case against the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In a motion filed in federal court on Tuesday, the SPLC highlighted “the government’s materially false statements,” specifically Blanche’s claim that the civil rights organization did not report to law enforcement information gathered by informants undercover in hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

“There’s no allegation or information in the indictment that suggests [the SPLC] shared [the information from the informants] with law enforcement,” Blanche said last week on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle, in comments highlighted in the court filing. “There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement. To the contrary, or else we would have known, from their own words, that they had given this money to these guys. And we didn’t know.”

But the SPLC claims that’s exactly what it did, documenting incidents as far back as the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and, as recently as this month, sharing detailed information from paid informants with federal law enforcement.

“Weeks before the indictment, undersigned counsel provided information to the government demonstrating unequivocally that the SPLC had shared information from its informants with law enforcement,” the organization wrote in its motion. “The government’s false statement is highly material to the charges. The indictment alleges that the SPLC was paying informants not to dismantle ‘racist groups’ but instead paid informants who were ‘engaged in the active promotion of racist groups.’ In fact, the prosecutors in this case knew of specific instances when the SPLC provided information to law enforcement to thwart, stop, or otherwise help dismantle the activities of those racist groups.”

This gaffe from Blanche—made publicly on Fox News—raises questions regarding the DOJ’s chances of actually winning this case, especially given its recent string of losses.

A federal judge is tapping out of the Trump administration.

Donald Trump appointed Judge Alan Albright in 2018, but last week, the Texas-based judge announced his sudden resignation, revealing that his time on the bench will come to a close in August.

The reason seems to be related to personal fulfillment: Bloomberg Law reported Monday that Albright had given “signs” that he “wasn’t enjoying the job” in the week leading up to his shock retirement.

In his wake, Albright leaves behind one of the largest backlogs of litigation for any federal judge. As of last September, Albright’s lagging pen accounted for 70 percent of the 129 civil cases that were pending in the Western District of Texas for three years or longer. At the same time, Albright had 446 undecided motions, approximately twice the number of any other district judge in the Fifth Circuit. His colleagues in Austin—Robert Pitman and David Ezra—had none, according to Bloomberg.

The 66-year-old also accounted for 63 percent of the 706 civil motions still awaiting decisions for six months or longer.

And that workload isn’t expected to lighten by the time Albright resigns. Instead, the federal judge is expected to push some of the unresolved caseload onto his staff and his successor, immediately hampering whoever is chosen to replace him.

“He has a huge docket that now the other judges are going to have,” Lee Yeakel, a retired judge from the Western District of Texas, told Bloomberg, “because it’s not going to go down appreciably by the end of August, no matter how hard he works.”

So far, over the course of his two terms, Trump has appointed 271 judges across the judiciary. But his recent grip on the judiciary—including a decision to fire and replace more than 100 immigration judges since he returned to office last year—has raised eyebrows and sparked uneasy questions about the governmental branch’s independence from the White House.

The Justice Department has opened a massive recruitment drive to fill the immigration vacancies. In doing so, the agency has tapped 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 has pledged to “fight exclusively for the rights of men” and believes that women are a “warm, wet hole.”

Other picks are 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.”