With LeBron James already conveying his intention to leave the Los Angeles Lakers and Austin Reaves re-signing, Rui Hachimura is now biggest member of the Lakers' 2025-26 roster whose free agency fate remains uncertain.
The Justice Department (DOJ) declined on Thursday to release additional unredacted records from its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, telling a federal judge that it has already adequately complied with the law. The DOJ’s response came in the final hours of a court-ordered deadline to remove redactions in at least a dozen documents…
Reporter Katie Phang recently nabbed a huge win against interim AG Todd Blanche and his crusade to keep the Epstein files under wraps. After months of stalling by the administration of President Donald Trump and ignoring the letter of a new law demanding the release of the sex-trafficker’s files, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan opened the floodgates on Trump’s longtime friend. Sullivan sided with former MS NOW show host Katie Phang in her lawsuit demanding the Trump administration adhere to the Epstein Transparency Act.Now, fresh off her big win, Phang tells “Left Hook” podcaster Wajahat Ali that Blanche, Trump and his entire crew appeared to be a bunch of idiots who had no real plan to protect Trump from being implicated in the Epstein files.“They're damned if they do and damned if they don't,” howled Phang. “You either produce it and now we have information that I and others can track down and do more reporting on, or you don't … it means they're trying to hide s——.”“If I were them I'd comply,” Phang told Ali. “I'd say ‘here are the names of the co-conspirators. Here are the names of the bad people that sent these terrible f—— emails. Here are the names of possible perpetrators. Have a nice day.’ But they are so dumb the way that they play this game. They had no f—— strategy and p—— off a federal judge like Emmett Sullivan … [who] told [Trump conspiracist] Michael Flynn to his face ‘you are a traitor to this country.’”Sullivan’s ruling means Blanche now must explain to a court why he shouldn't be forced to release names redacted from emails and documents that reference potentially damning videos and allegations of abuse of minors. Also included in redacted info includes the potential names of Epstein’s co-conspirators, as well as potentially damaging FBI interview notes from a victim who claimed Epstein introduced her to President Donald Trump when she was only 13.Phang told Ali that she had no doubt Sullivan put Trump administration in terrible danger.“Starting last year right … in the spring of 2025 they convene in the situation room about the Epstein files and it's not just the vice president of the United States, JD Vance there,” said Phang. “It was also then-attorney general Pam Bondi. It was FBI director Kash Patel. It's the deputy director of the FBI, Dan Bongino. It was then-deputy attorney general Todd Blanche. … It's the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. It's the White House council … and a slew of other people. If something [fatal] had happened to that situation room pretty much … the entirety of the trump administration upper echelon would be f—— exterminated.”“The fact that you convene all those people repeatedly in the Situation Room you don't have to be a Rhodes scholar to figure out that there is something politically toxically horribly bad for the President of the United States [in those files],” she said.Phang added that she deliberately targeted Blanche in the suit to make him the prime target.“Unlike in other lawsuits when the DOJ is being sued and they parade in some junior federal prosecutor who has to go hat-in-hand to sit there and explain what happened or why they didn't do it, I only sued one person,” Phang said gleefully. “So, Todd Blanche … is gonna have to show up. You can't just send in some lackey.”
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The Supreme Court’s ruling this week on birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara totaled approximately 194 pages. I wrote earlier this week about the various positions that each of the justices took. But it is worth dwelling for an extra moment on the unusual position taken by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in just 10 strange pages.Unlike the rest of his colleagues, Kavanaugh took the position that Trump’s executive order was constitutionally permissible but statutorily illegal. In other words, the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause did not block Trump’s effort to curtail birthright citizenship, but an act of Congress that used identical language did.At a very superficial level, this might sound sensible and moderate by implicitly inviting Congress to address the situation. Kavanaugh certainly positions the opinion—and himself—as such. On closer inspection, it might be the most dangerous and extreme view of U.S. citizenship to be articulated by the justices this week.To understand Kavanaugh’s position, a brief sketch of the other justices’ views is necessary. Last January, Trump issued an executive order that instructed federal agencies to not recognize the U.S. citizenship of children whose parents were undocumented immigrants or living in the United States on temporary visas. A group of plaintiffs sued, arguing that this violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.That clause reads as follows: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” In the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court ruled that the son of two Chinese immigrants in San Francisco had acquired U.S. citizenship at birth solely by virtue of being born on American soil. The “subject to the jurisdiction” exception was narrowed to a handful of situations that rarely apply today.In Tuesday’s ruling in Barbara, the justices essentially took four separate positions. Five of them took what can be described as the consensus view. Americans had inherited the rule of birthright citizenship from the English common law, Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his majority opinion. Dred Scott v. Sandford’s holding that people of African descent were ineligible for U.S. citizenship was a violation of that rule, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause restored and entrenched the original understanding.Two of Roberts’s fellow conservatives, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, took a different view. Thomas affirmed Wong Kim Ark as correct but argued a person’s domicile status—or, more specifically, that of their parents—also determined whether that person had U.S. citizenship at birth. Since Trump’s executive order was lawful in at least some circumstances, like birth tourism, the two justices rejected the facial challenge to its constitutionality.At the same time, both justices signaled that even if their domicile-focused view had prevailed, it would not grant total victory to the Trump administration. Thomas and Gorsuch concluded that children of temporary visa holders would not be eligible, and their respective dissents largely focused on that aspect of the order. But both justices wrote that they would not necessarily reach the same conclusion for children of undocumented immigrants, especially if they had lived long-term in the U.S.The third position was adopted solely by Justice Samuel Alito, who argued that the clause “confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.” He argued that Wong Kim Ark should be read much more narrowly by the court since, in his view, it showed “little respect for precedent.” Instead, Alito leaned heavily on phrasing in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which only extended U.S. citizenship to those “not subject to any foreign power,” a narrower phrasing than the clause that was ratified three years later.Even then, Alito ultimately concluded that Wong Kim Ark was correctly decided. The Chinese Exclusion Acts had made it impossible for Chinese immigrants to be naturalized, so Wong’s parents faced a different threshold under the clause. “By establishing domicile, they had done everything within their power to express their desire and intent to become Americans,” Alito explained.“Wong Kim Ark is therefore best understood as holding that people who are lawfully present here, establish the United States as their intended permanent home, and do everything within their power to become United States citizens can be seen as no longer subject to any foreign power,” Alito argued.That brings us, at last, to Kavanaugh. He voted with the majority to strike down the order on different grounds from those of Roberts and the other four justices in the majority. Kavanaugh said that he found the constitutional issue to be “far more complicated” than the statutory one.
Justice Alito warns the Supreme Court's birthright citizenship ruling threatens national security by extending citizenship to children of birth tourists.
