For the first time since the start of a precarious ceasefire two months ago, Israel and Iran have traded missile strikes.
THE IRAN RUNAROUND. Last Wednesday, President Donald Trump told reporters that talks to end the Iran war were going “very well,” so well that they might result in an agreement in a few days. “I mean, if it happens — it might not happen, who knows? But if it happens, it could happen over the weekend,” […]
Trump administration officials earlier this year killed a federal criminal investigation into the coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia and a close ally of the president’s.The investigation examined potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by the multistate mining operations largely run by Justice’s son, Jay, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.The criminal probe was a significant escalation in the yearslong effort to police serial pollution offenses by Virginia-based Southern Coal and dozens of affiliated mining operations controlled by the family. In the past decade, Southern Coal and other Justice corporations have racked up tens of thousands of alleged violations of the Clean Water Act and have been sued repeatedly by state and federal prosecutors over their failure to properly follow environmental laws at their mining sites.The investigation shuttered by the Trump administration was a joint effort by prosecutors and investigators with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Virginia to probe whether the incessant violations of antipollution laws had risen to the level of criminal behavior, people familiar with the matter said.People familiar with the investigation told ProPublica that prosecutors believed they had a strong case. They initially had the blessing of Robert Tracci, President Donald Trump’s top official in the Western District of Virginia, to move forward.But in recent months, as prosecutors battled the Justice companies in court over subpoenas for records, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General shut down the probe. At the time, Todd Blanche still headed the office, before assuming the role of acting attorney general in April.“They were told ‘pencils down,’” a person familiar with the investigation said.That prosecutors were even conducting a criminal investigation is noteworthy, people said, because the DOJ only charges a dozen or so criminal Clean Water Act cases each year. It is rare for top DOJ officials to derail a criminal investigation initiated by career officials at such an early stage, people familiar with the case said.“I’ve never heard of that happening before,” said former federal prosecutor Rick Mountcastle, speaking generally about DOJ protocols. Mountcastle spent 24 years as a prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia. “There shouldn’t be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement.”The move is part of a pattern of behavior at the top echelons of the DOJ to push cases against Trump’s political adversaries and ease up on allies.Environmental enforcement against large polluters has plunged under the second Trump administration. Just days after inauguration, the administration reassigned top career environmental lawyers at the DOJ, including those overseeing the Southern Coal case, to work on the president’s immigration crackdown. At the beginning of the year, Blanche personally ordered prosecutors to stand down from cases against diesel emissions cheating.Steven Ruby, an attorney for the Justice companies, said they became aware of the criminal investigation earlier this year.“Ultimately the finding of the inquiry by the government was that there wasn’t any evidence to pursue criminal charges,” Ruby said. “There’s never been any intentional wrongdoing by the companies.”While objecting to the subpoenas in court, the company simultaneously convinced the DOJ to drop the case, he said.“The Justice companies — because Sen. Justice has been governor and because he’s now a senator — are singled out and put under a microscope, and there’s news coverage of violations and consent decrees and compliance actions,” Ruby said. “But the fact of the matter is that those kinds of issues exist throughout the industry.”Current and former government officials familiar with the companies’ environmental record called them routine bad actors. Spokespeople for the EPA and the Western District of Virginia referred questions to the DOJ. Justice’s senate office did not respond to questions.“There is no case to be made here for a criminal investigation,” Emily Covington, a DOJ spokeswoman, said in an email. “Any career prosecutor who would paint a criminal case as strong is simply a deep state prosecutor continuing to push the priorities of the Biden administration.”The deputy attorney general’s office is routinely involved with reviewing cases, she added. The office determined that this case was not consistent with the Trump administration’s priorities, she continued, and it was more appropriate to resolve it through the less punitive civil process. “The bottom line is that this was a politically motivated prosecution for a case that can and should be resolved civilly,” she wrote.The Justice family runs a sprawling coal mining enterprise that extends across the South.
Trump administration officials earlier this year killed a federal criminal investigation into the coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia and a close ally of the president’s.The investigation examined potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by the multistate mining operations largely run by Justice’s son, Jay, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.The criminal probe was a significant escalation in the yearslong effort to police serial pollution offenses by Virginia-based Southern Coal and dozens of affiliated mining operations controlled by the family. In the past decade, Southern Coal and other Justice corporations have racked up tens of thousands of alleged violations of the Clean Water Act and have been sued repeatedly by state and federal prosecutors over their failure to properly follow environmental laws at their mining sites.The investigation shuttered by the Trump administration was a joint effort by prosecutors and investigators with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Virginia to probe whether the incessant violations of antipollution laws had risen to the level of criminal behavior, people familiar with the matter said.People familiar with the investigation told ProPublica that prosecutors believed they had a strong case. They initially had the blessing of Robert Tracci, President Donald Trump’s top official in the Western District of Virginia, to move forward.But in recent months, as prosecutors battled the Justice companies in court over subpoenas for records, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General shut down the probe. At the time, Todd Blanche still headed the office, before assuming the role of acting attorney general in April.“They were told ‘pencils down,’” a person familiar with the investigation said.That prosecutors were even conducting a criminal investigation is noteworthy, people said, because the DOJ only charges a dozen or so criminal Clean Water Act cases each year. It is rare for top DOJ officials to derail a criminal investigation initiated by career officials at such an early stage, people familiar with the case said.“I’ve never heard of that happening before,” said former federal prosecutor Rick Mountcastle, speaking generally about DOJ protocols. Mountcastle spent 24 years as a prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia. “There shouldn’t be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement.”The move is part of a pattern of behavior at the top echelons of the DOJ to push cases against Trump’s political adversaries and ease up on allies.Environmental enforcement against large polluters has plunged under the second Trump administration. Just days after inauguration, the administration reassigned top career environmental lawyers at the DOJ, including those overseeing the Southern Coal case, to work on the president’s immigration crackdown. At the beginning of the year, Blanche personally ordered prosecutors to stand down from cases against diesel emissions cheating.Steven Ruby, an attorney for the Justice companies, said they became aware of the criminal investigation earlier this year.“Ultimately the finding of the inquiry by the government was that there wasn’t any evidence to pursue criminal charges,” Ruby said. “There’s never been any intentional wrongdoing by the companies.”While objecting to the subpoenas in court, the company simultaneously convinced the DOJ to drop the case, he said.“The Justice companies — because Sen. Justice has been governor and because he’s now a senator — are singled out and put under a microscope, and there’s news coverage of violations and consent decrees and compliance actions,” Ruby said. “But the fact of the matter is that those kinds of issues exist throughout the industry.”Current and former government officials familiar with the companies’ environmental record called them routine bad actors.Spokespeople for the EPA and the Western District of Virginia referred questions to the DOJ. Justice’s senate office did not respond to questions.“There is no case to be made here for a criminal investigation,” Emily Covington, a DOJ spokeswoman, said in an email. “Any career prosecutor who would paint a criminal case as strong is simply a deep state prosecutor continuing to push the priorities of the Biden administration.”The deputy attorney general’s office is routinely involved with reviewing cases, she added. The office determined that this case was not consistent with the Trump administration’s priorities, she continued, and it was more appropriate to resolve it through the less punitive civil process. “The bottom line is that this was a politically motivated prosecution for a case that can and should be resolved civilly,” she wrote.The Justice family runs a sprawling coal mining enterprise that extends across the South.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is demanding the removal of acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte from his post in exchange for supporting an extension of a government spy tool set to lapse this week. When asked Monday if there was any scenario he would support an extension of Section 702 of the […]
The man California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called "Gestapo Greg" is now gunning for the White House — and he's ready to take on whoever President Donald Trump has in mind as his successor.Gregory Bovino, the firebrand former Border Patrol commander-at-large who became the face of Trump's brutal immigration crackdowns in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, has launched an exploratory committee for a 2028 presidential bid, NewsNation confirmed Monday. The move puts him on a direct collision course with Trump, who has publicly backed a Vance-Rubio ticket as his preferred succession plan."If I were President, I'd lead that [deportation] effort from the front and be on the front lines from time to time," Bovino said in a statement first reported by the Daily Beast — a barely veiled shot at Trump, whom he has accused of going soft on immigration.The bid comes loaded with baggage. Bovino was ousted in January after federal agents under his command fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. He was widely photographed in a long dark coat that Newsom, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, described as looking like Bovino "literally went on eBay and purchased SS garb." When Bovino was subsequently removed from his post, Newsom wrote on X: "Gestapo Greg is out. Keep the pressure up. It's working."More recently, Bovino attended a far-right "Remigration Summit" in Portugal, where he was photographed alongside the event's organizer — a man who invoked the Weimar Republic as a model for mass deportation policy.His own party isn't impressed. When asked about Bovino's criticisms of the Department of Homeland Security, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin delivered a withering dismissal: "I never met the guy. He's irrelevant to me. I don't know who he is."Bovino's campaign website, Bovino2028.com, carries the slogan "House Bovino — Men Fight Back" and refers to immigrants as "foreign hordes."
U.S. District Judge Roy Altman, a President Donald Trump appointee, threatened to sanction Trump's legal team for missing a June 5 court deadline in a $10 billion libel lawsuit against the BBC. Instead of filing required responses to the BBC's motion to dismiss, Trump's attorneys submitted two last-minute procedural filings: one seeking permission for excess pages and another, requesting to file under seal. Both were submitted without requesting a deadline extension. Altman ordered the legal team to explain by June 10 why sanctions should not be imposed for their apparent disregard of court deadlines and questioned whether the BBC's motion should be considered unopposed. The December lawsuit accuses the BBC of defamation by splicing two portions of Trump's January 6 speech, made 55 minutes apart, to suggest he provoked the assault on the Capitol.They cited the President's infamous remark, "fight like hell."The BBC apologized for the edit but argues, Florida court lacks jurisdiction over a documentary never aired in the United States, reports Politico. Legal experts, like Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, remain skeptical of the case's legal merit and jurisdictional basis.The BBC's motion to dismiss remains pending since March.Watch the video below. Your browser does not support the video tag.
Over the course of both Trump terms, he and his allies have used a “flood the zone” approach where they attempt to overwhelm opponents with controversial actions and statements so quickly that response becomes impossible. Now, the court wrangling over President Donald Trump’s controversial ballroom reveals that he applies a similar strategy to his vanity and construction projects: “move fast and break things and nobody has standing.”This is according to Lawfare senior editor Molly Roberts, who was directly quoting the judge overseeing the case — a characterization with which Trump’s lawyers openly agreed. Roberts was on hand for the oral arguments between attorneys representing the White House and those for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the latter of which had filed for an injunction barring construction while the case was heard. That injunction was granted while allowing only construction “strictly necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House and its grounds” to continue pending appeal. The White House then tried to argue that the ruling actually allowed for the construction of the ballroom, arguing that the whole thing was vital for security, which the judge did not buy, reaffirming that aboveground construction must halt until approved by Congress. The president’s ‘break things’ approach was revealed in the subsequent appeal.According to Roberts, these latest appeal proceedings are “simultaneously more like and more unlike your typical litigation than those following the matter might have expected. More like, because the lawyer presenting for the government sounds like a lawyer and not the president on a Truth Social spree… Less like, because what this lawyer is saying is that neither these judges nor any can stop the administration from building what it wants to build once it has started building them. Not now, not ever.”During oral arguments, after much back and forth, the White House lawyers essentially argued that once the president had already taken certain actions on the basis of security — such as, say, bulldozing the White House East Wing — there was no legal mechanism allowing a lawsuit to be brought against the government. The judge then raised a specific example: what if the White House were gone? Say an administration decides that security justifies an entirely new building, tears down the White House, and then someone decides to sue. Would such a suit be legal?According to Roberts, White House lawyers argued that it would not be if the destruction of the original White House had already occurred.“So move fast and break things and nobody has standing?” asked the judge. “Bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, and as long as the government does it fast enough, too bad, nothing to be done?”“I think that’s right,” said the White House attorney.What’s more, the judge had an important question about what would happen were construction allowed to proceed while the case was heard. If the government lost a year or so down the line and the ballroom was declared illegal, would the White House tear it down, or would its argument, “for the same safety and security reasons, be we can’t take it down?” The White agreed with the latter. “So your position is this can’t be stopped by a court?” the judge asked. “That court, this court, the Supreme Court, no court could stop the building of this?”The White House agreed.“If this were complete lawlessness by the government,” the judge pressed, “it couldn’t be stopped?”“Yes,” Roberts explained. According to the Trump administration, “even if the ballroom construction were complete lawlessness by the government, only Congress — not the courts — would have any independent role in stopping it.”
President Donald Trump just received a public assist from House Speaker Mike Johnson in his unsubstantiated claims that California’s elections have been stolen — but Johnson himself admitted that Trump’s claims are “impossible to prove.”“I'm not saying it's rigged,” Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju on Monday. “I'm saying it stinks to high heaven. And everybody knows that. Let's remove the appearance of impropriety. Let's have, what a concept, let's have votes on an election the day of the election. That's what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this.”When Raju asked whether Johnson has any evidence that the election is being rigged, the House Speaker admitted that he does not.“I don't — some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it is impossible to prove,” Johnson told Raju. “But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here. And that's a concern. We need people to believe in the integrity of our election system.”Johnson has been accused of controlling the House Republicans rather than serving the traditional presidential role of respecting the balance of power between the executive and legislature. In fact, NOTUS reported on Monday that Trump has so much power over the House, he has joked that he and not Johnson is in fact the real House Speaker.“I have two jobs: being president and being speaker,” Trump once teased Johnson while other lawmakers watched him do it. Trump’s joke refers to Johnson repeatedly going to the president to get potentially defecting Republicans in line behind his agenda, with Johnson himself repeatedly failing to do so.For example, in 2025 Trump reportedly yelled at Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) over the phone until she started crying and walked away, according to what two sources told NOTUS. After she left, Trump continued to rant to the remaining lawmakers who were present for her humiliation.“I have no f—— idea what she just said," Trump told the other members.That incident, according to NOTUS, was merely one of many. Two sources told NOTUS that House members are instructed to check with the White House before proposing legislation. One anonymous House Republican lawmaker told NOTUS that as a result, House Speaker Johnson and the rest of that body’s leaders have failed in their basic legislative duties.This is "a total shirking of responsibilities to the White House,” the source told NOTUS. “Everything has to be preordained and pre-blessed, and there’s very little that we’re able to have our own will on. We should be empowered to pass our own priorities, not just follow what the mandate of the day is.”