Democratic Absences Mean Trump Lawyer Is Now a Judge for Life

One of President Trump’s personal lawyers now has a federal judgeship for life, and it’s thanks to multiple Senate Democrats being absent.

Justin Smith, 41, was confirmed by the Senate Tuesday in a 48–43 vote, with every Democrat voting against his nomination, while all but one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, voted for him. Nine senators missed the vote: Michael Bennet, Kevin Cramer, John Curtis, Angus King, Ben Ray Luján, Cynthia Lummis, Bernie Sanders, Raphael Warnock, and Mitch McConnell.

Bennet, King, Luján, Sanders, and Warnock all caucus with the Democratic Party, and if they had been present to cast a “no” vote, Smith’s vote would have been blocked in a 48–48 tie. Smith will now sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, overseeing federal district court appeals in Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Smith represented Trump in his presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court and worked on his case to have the Supreme Court overturn the sexual assault and defamation charge against the president brought by E. Jean Carroll. Despite being nominated to the federal bench in March, Smith continued representing Trump in Carroll’s case.

In his confirmation hearings in April, Smith refused to say who won the 2020 presidential election, and refused to answer questions about whether he would recuse himself from any cases involving Trump, sparring with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal.

Smith is now the third of Trump’s personal lawyers to be appointed as a federal judge, and the second to be confirmed. He’ll join Emil Bove, who, while working for the Justice Department in Trump’s first term, told his fellow federal prosecutors to disobey court orders and say “fuck you” to judges who ruled against them.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on the Senate floor Tuesday that Smith’s conflicts of interest raised “serious questions.”

“These are lifetime appointments to federal judgeships—lifetime appointments which have to be given to people who have been carefully scrutinized. We have not done that when it comes to Mr. Smith,” Durbin said.

President Trump has taken further steps to dismantle the Department of Education, moving offices for special education and civil rights to other departments.

The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services will be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services, while the Department of Justice will take over civil rights issues, the Trump administration announced Tuesday.

The moves are worrying, especially considering Trump’s campaign to dismantle the Department of Education as well as who he has appointed to HHS and the DOJ. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made worrying comments about autism, making outlandish claims and changing policies on vaccines to fit his medically inaccurate views.

Kennedy’s views have also been criticized as incorporating eugenics, which should not be anywhere near special education in America. It raises fears that students with special needs could be marginalized or worse.

When it comes to civil rights, the DOJ has been ground zero for the Trump administration’s attacks on “wokeness,” undermining its own Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and targeting one of America’s leading civil rights organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center. The person in charge of the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ, Harmeet Dhillon, is a loyal foot soldier to Trump.

Now the Department of Education will be weakened further, and students will lose valuable resources as these offices are moved into departments without education experts. Combating discrimination and increasing special education resources used to be a priority in the United States, but no longer.

The Justice Department is indicting 15 Minnesotans on charges of conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, using vague Facebook posts and anti-ICE actions as grounds to deem them “antifa.”

All 15 people are involved with Direct Action Minnesota, which the administration accuses of “aggressive use of shields against law enforcement, surveillance, operational planning, and rapid mobilization against law enforcement actions.” The U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Daniel Rosen, alleged that the group “advocates, promotes, and utilizes militant tactics and violence.”

These are people who are using non-electoral tactics—many of which are legal, like observing—after watching federal agents kidnap immigrants and shoot their neighbors dead in the street. The administration even pointed to a Facebook post in which defendant Cameron Kennedy stated that they needed to become “ungovernable” as a flimsy example of antifa activity. And even with all that, it’s worth mentioning for the umpteenth time that antifa is not a cohesive, established group that exists. There is no leader, no headquarters, no yearly conference. 

The Trump administration is cracking down on people who took action against what they saw as a violent occupation of their city by following and impeding ICE officers and making mean posts on Facebook. This crusade against antifa is a cover for a wide net of First Amendment suppression against any kind of left-leaning individual or group–from Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil to these 15 Minnesotans.  

The Trump sons’ crypto scam is about to make their family even more money.

World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance platform co-founded by Eric and Donald Jr., will almost certainly be approved for a national bank trust charter, according to two former staffers at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency who spoke with NOTUS Tuesday.

It was “inconceivable” that World Liberty Financial wouldn’t be approved, one of the staffers told NOTUS. Jonathan Gould, the current Trump-nominated comptroller of the currency, is due to deliver his decision on World Liberty Financial’s application soon. He has previously eased restrictions and allowed for more crypto companies to receive bank charters.

Receiving a national bank trust charter would allow World Liberty Financial to independently issue its USD1 stablecoin directly to American consumers, sidestep liquidity requirements, and settle financial transactions like platforms such as Venmo or Paypal—for which the Trump family could potentially receive a cut.

David Wachsman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, insisted to NOTUS that “none of its leadership or employees work for the U.S. government, and there are no conflicts of interest.”

Eric and Donald Jr. are the company’s co-founders, while Barron serves as a “Web3 Ambassador,” and Donald Trump reigns as “chief crypto advocate.” The company has previously claimed that the president has not been involved in its business since he was reelected to the White House. But his family took even greater control over the company after his inauguration, asserting a claim to more than 75 percent of net revenue from token sales, and 60 percent from the firm’s operations.

Trump owns 70 percent of an LLC that owns 38 percent of the shares in a holding company behind World Liberty Financial, according to the president’s most recent financial disclosures. The rest is managed by family members. In June 2025, Trump reported having earned $57 million from World Liberty Financial in 2024.

Kash Patel’s big mouth might have just gummed up another investigation.

The FBI director frustrated Secret Service officials by prematurely announcing the details of an investigation into a violent attack planned for the White House UFC event, according to multiple sources that spoke with MS NOW Tuesday.

Patel revealed components of the investigation via a social media post earlier in the day, sharing that “multiple individuals” were in custody.

“On June 10, FBI and our law enforcement partners became aware of a potential threat to the UFC America 250 event in Washington, D.C. involving individuals outside of the National Capital Region,” Patel wrote.

Nearly two dozen people participated in Signal group chats discussing an alleged plot to strike the UFC’s America 250 event with explosive-laden drones so as to rush the evacuating crowd into the crosshairs of a pre-staged sniper team, reported Fox News. Five people are reportedly in custody in connection with the scheme.

“While the result represented the best of investigative work, it was also nothing out of the ordinary for this law enforcement team—we are built to detect, respond to, and bring to justice those who threaten the lives of American citizens—particularly during large gatherings like the historic UFC 250 fight,” Patel continued in his X post. “That’s exactly what we did here. I want to thank our great agents and partners, this work remains ongoing and we will continue to update the public as permitted.”

A White House spokesman claimed that the incident was exactly why the White House needed the proposed $400 million ballroom—though the 90,000-square-foot space still would not have been capable of housing the UFC event, nor was the fight ever planned to be indoors.

It’s not the first time that Patel has flubbed a federal investigation. In September, Patel’s reliance on the bureau’s planes waylaid the investigation into Charlie Kirk’s assassination by at least a day, preventing a critical analysis team from accessing a flight to the crime scene.

His personal flights interfered with another FBI investigation on December 13, when the FBI’s shooting reconstruction team was unable to immediately respond to a shooting at Brown University due to a lack of available bureau planes at an airport in Richmond, Virginia, according to Senator Dick Durbin.