Kari Lake, the Trump official running America’s international broadcasting agency Voice of America, said during a deposition this month that she wasn’t aware of Trump’s executive order shrinking the agency until the day it was issued.

French President walking to the UN but unable to get there because of Trump's motorcade seems like an apt metaphor for America's role now on the world stage

UPDATE: Lindsey Halligan has been sworn in as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, two days after Trump pressed Bondi to install her. www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

#BREAKING: Over dissents from Justices Sotomayor, Kagan & Jackson, #SCOTUS grants a stay in the Slaughter case (allowing President Trump to remove the last Dem member of the FTC), *and* grants certiorari "before judgment" to decide whether to formally overrule its 1935 ruling in Humphrey's Executor.

Reminder that in the Trump immunity ruling, the Supreme Court ruled specifically that the president has total immunity when it comes to his communications with Justice Department officials:

“The target repeatedly brought up Homan, saying he was collecting bribes in exchange for future government contracts, the two sources told Reuters.”

NEW: In a break from decades of history, the Trump administration has started detaining virtually everyone facing deportation — even if they’ve lived in the U.S. for decades. Dozens of judges, with increasing alarm, have ruled the policy shift illegal. www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

The FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration. Trump DOJ officials dropped the case. www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/t...

NEW: The Pentagon told journalists it will require them to pledge they won’t gather any information — even unclassified — that hasn’t been expressly authorized for release, and will revoke the press credentials of those who do not obey. @washingtonpost.com

“U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert informed employees at his office in Alexandria, Virginia, Friday that he intends to resign, according to sources, after President Donald Trump said he wants him out.”

Breaking News: A fight is said to be playing out over the fate of a U.S. attorney who hit roadblocks while investigating New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former FBI director James B. Comey, two Trump foes.

The White House Peace Vigil, widely considered the longest continuous act of political protest in U.S. history, was dismantled by federal law enforcement Thursday night after its more than 40-years of standing.

I experienced this last week & refused, saying I had never before been asked to provide the names of any analysts I was planning to quote to get a comment. Spox replied that maybe they were D donors. (In that case, it was 3 retired top military JAG officers.) I guess that was not a weird oneoff.

Multiple Second Circuit judges sign on to a concurrence that says another judge is making up quotes. "Sure enough, add some words, and the meaning will change" is a withering line.

Judge strikes Trump's lawsuit against New York Times over its content reut.rs/3Iwezum

A federal judge has thrown out President Trump's lawsuit against The New York Times. The suit, he says, "stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements" of federal court rules. It is "decidedly improper and impermissible." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

An eye-opening look at what's really behind online scams: www.reuters.com/graphics/SOU...

Pres Trump’s unprecedented assertions of executive power that underlie his economic policy are now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court www.reuters.com/world/us/key...

DOJ's Inspector General says a former FBI Assistant Director "went on a government paid, 13-day international trip to two countries for the purpose of visiting two of the Assistant Director’s persona 'bucket list' countries," including "4 days at a beach resort, at government expense."

US imposes new sanctions on Sinaloa Cartel and associates, including Mexican lawmaker reut.rs/3VkISat

Military lawyers have warned that President Trump's strikes on two drug boats might not have been legal, possibly raising risks for the service members involved, "but believe they are being ignored or deliberately sidelined." www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

SCOTUS set the date for the oral arguments it will hear concerning the legality of Trump's sweeping global tariffs for November 5 in a major test of the president's assertions of executive power that has been central to his economic and trade agenda reut.rs/4moRt6S

WOW. Judge Kelly takes the Trump admin to task for their outrageous effort to deport children in the dead of the night. Not only does he say their justification "crumbled like a house of cards," he also says the admin was not engaging in "conduct ... that reflect[s] good faith."

It's not just murder. The US is on track to have the largest one-year percent drops in reported murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and auto theft this year based on data through July.

Musk’s X can sue watchdog Media Matters in Texas, US judge rules reut.rs/47HFdLd

DOJ has filed a lawsuit against the state of Oregon, seeking access to its voter registration rolls. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

For the first time in decades, the U.S. has decertified Colombia as a drug control partner — a symbolic blow to one of Washington's closest allies in Latin America.

92% of Americans say it's very or somewhat important that the media in the US can report the news without government censorship. www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/...

NEWS NBC News LOSES its effort to unseal the identities of two people Epstein wired six-figure transfers of money to after the Herald's exposé. The government and two lawyers for victims opposed the effort. Quick thread storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Great work by Reuters revealing how easy it is to overcome AI chatbots' protections against phishing email generation. "All went to work crafting deceptions after mild cajoling or being fed simple ruses." www.reuters.com/investigates...

"When one senior Justice Department official was told that the demands of the [D.C.] crackdown were overtaxing agents, he replied that they should 'drink more coffee,' according to a person familiar with the conversation." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/u...

JUST IN: Georgia Supreme Court won't consider Fani Willis' petition to reclaim her prosecution of President Trump. She's officially disqualified and the case must now be assigned to a new prosecutorial office. www.gasupreme.us/wp-content/u...

How ICE forged its more aggressive enforcement tactics in Boston. www.wsj.com/us-news/ice-...

I haven't had time to write a story on this, but last week the DOJ Inspector General released a report on medical neglect at a federal detention center in Seattle. They found a guy with a basketball-sized hernia who'd been waiting four months for treatment oig.justice.gov/sites/defaul...

The U.S. has been intercepting boats like this for decades. The crews are overwhelmingly low-level people trying to make money, albeit illegally.

DOJ has moved to drop the charges against still another person accused of assaulting law police during Trump's D.C. surge. This case involved a man who allegedly tried to flee from ICE agents, causing one of them to scrape his knee. (The normal number of cases DOJ drops like this is near zero.)

This is an archived government report that found that “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.” It existed yesterday and is gone today.

We asked major AI chatbots to help craft a phishing scam. They did. From fake charities to urgent pleas, the bots delivered. This investigation shows how generative AI is fueling fraud — and why it’s so hard to stop. Read our findings here: reut.rs/3K400yU

From the arrests reports I've seen, it looks like the National Guard soldiers who've been patrolling D.C. for a month have made exactly two arrests. One was in an alleged assault on a Park Police officer. DOJ dismissed that case. The other was of a woman who allegedly spat on a guardsman's leg.

Some of the world's most powerful AI tools were perfectly willing to help @reuters.com cook up phishing emails to scam the elderly. Grok, Elon Musk's AI, did it even though reports told it they wanted its help scamming older people. www.reuters.com/investigates...

New from 404 Media: airlines are selling *5 billion* ticketing records to the government for warrantless searching, per new docs we obtained. ARC is a data broker owned by United, American, Delta, etc. Then sells peoples' travel info to ICE, Secret Service, FBI etc www.404media.co/airlines-sel...

NEW: A judge warned Friday that the Trump admin is "with a wink and a nod" deporting people to Ghana, only for Ghana to quickly re-deport them to countries where they face torture and persecution. w/ @joshgerstein www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

A partially unsealed copy of DOJ's request to search John Bolton's house shows its investigation is related to his book, which was critical of President Trump. There's also a section titled "Hack of Bolton AOL Account by Foreign Entity" that's almost entirely blacked-out.

A new lawsuit claims the Trump administration tried to bypass deportation restrictions by flying people out of the U.S. on a military aircraft to Ghana, which would then send them on to their home countries, even though U.S. judges had found they could not be forced to return there.

New Orleans is on pace for the fewest murders in 55 years and nearly every major crime type is plunging.

DOJ has dropped another case in D.C., this one involving a convicted felon who prosecutors alleged possessed a gun. A judge had ruled that that police officers' having seen someone else smoking a marijuana cigarette near him was not a legal basis to search the car where the gun was found.

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Majority of Brazilian Supreme Court panel votes to convict former president Jair Bolsonaro of attempting a coup.

NEW: A group of appeals court judges openly struggled with — and in some cases criticized — the Supreme Court's terse and vague shadow docket rulings. One said they've left lower courts "in limbo," forcing them to interpret "signals" w/ @joshgerstein.bsky.social www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

Old journalism rule: Don't publish everything you hear on the police scanner.

DOJ's extraordinary losing streak in cases from Trump's D.C. "surge" continues. Last night, it asked a court to drop the charges against a man accused of assaulting an FBI agent, saying "the available evidence no longer supports continued prosecution." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...