President Donald Trump's drive to keep Jack Smith's report on his alleged illegal activity secret could be undone by his own Justice Department's push to release recordings of former President Joe Biden.Two transparency groups filed briefs with a federal appeals court this week, asking it to lift the order blocking the public release of former special counsel Jack Smith's report on Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents.The groups — American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University — argue the appeals court has both the power and the obligation to act, according to reply briefs filed in the 11th Circuit.Court records show the report has been blocked from public release since January 2025, when U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, sitting in Florida, barred the Justice Department from releasing it to protect the fair-trial rights of Trump's co-defendants, Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. The criminal case collapsed weeks later — but Cannon made the order permanent in February 2026 anyway.Earlier this year, according to court filings, Trump's Justice Department reversed a years-long policy. It moved to release audio recordings of Biden's private conversations with his biographer, framing the move as a push for government transparency. Trump personally pushed to make the recordings available as a part of his years-long smear campaign against the former president."I'd like to see it," Trump said at a May Cabinet meeting. "The man was grossly incompetent."Biden sued to block the release. On July 21, according to CBS News, a federal appeals court in Washington denied his request in a 2-1 ruling, finding he had not shown that privacy laws barred the recordings from disclosure."If the government does not oppose that motion, and the court grants it, that information, no matter its public import, will remain forever hidden because there is no avenue for a third party to challenge the order," American Oversight wrote in its reply brief, calling the Biden case "curiously familiar" and turning the ruling directly against Trump's injunction.The Washington court had also found that the public holds a "weighty" and "significant" interest in scrutinizing special counsel investigations — even when no charges are brought, American Oversight noted. The group argued that interest is even stronger when charges were filed, and a prosecution proceeded before the case collapsed.The Knight First Amendment Institute separately noted in its own reply brief that neither Trump's legal team nor the Justice Department has attempted to argue that the public's right of access has been overcome — and that silence, the group argued, is enough for the court to rule against them.The 11th Circuit now holds the question.
Immigration attorneys and advocates are sounding the alarm over a new Trump administration rule that could send hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers into deportation proceedings without ever getting a hearing.The rule, which took effect immediately Tuesday without prior public input, allows officials to transfer as many as 444,724 pending asylum cases — nearly a third of the 1.4 million backlog at USCIS — directly to Justice Department immigration judges, reported the Washington Post.Because those judges have been empowered to dismiss certain cases without a hearing, attorneys warn many asylum seekers could be removed from the country with no chance to make their case at all.Attorney Ira Kurzban, who represented Haitian immigrants in a related Supreme Court case, described the move as part of a broader strategy to "take legal people and make them illegal," which he said betrays United Nations protections for refugees and turns the asylum system into a "joke."“At a 30,000-foot level it sure looks like a deportation machine,” he said.Advocates are especially troubled that the new rule targets largely asylum seekers who filed more than a year after arriving, a technical deadline under federal law that judges can normally waive in extraordinary circumstances. Immigration courts don't provide public defenders, and advocates say people fleeing persecution are often unfamiliar with U.S. filing deadlines — meaning legitimate claims could be swept up and denied a fair review.The rule arrives as the administration prepares to terminate Temporary Protected Status work permits for Haitians and Syrians, following a Supreme Court ruling that allowed those protections to lapse. Lawyers say immigrants in both groups who also have pending asylum claims could now face deportation on two fronts simultaneously.Trump officials defend the rule as necessary to stop the asylum system from being "exploited" for delay and work authorization. But for critics, the rule's immediate effect, its bypassing of standard review, and its potential to strip due process from vulnerable applicants mark a significant escalation in the administration's push to reshape U.S. asylum policy.
President Trump, lawmakers, and world leaders are paying their respects to the late Senator Lindsey Graham this afternoon. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are in Washington DC for the funeral.
The post WATCH LIVE: Trump Attends Lindsey Graham’s Funeral appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
A top immigration policy expert accused a right-wing online news source of spreading an “outrageous lie” on Monday about the US Department of Homeland Security’s top statistician, who resigned over the weekend and cited President Donald Trump’s “war on immigrants” as a major reason for his departure.America First Post wrote in a post on social media that Marc Rosenblum, who until recently was the executive director of the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), “easily could’ve been underreporting deportations or illegal populations, ruining data.”Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, countered that Rosenblum sought under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration to publish “the most transparent data on immigration enforcement ever; monthly information on [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection] arrests and removals, stuff that had NEVER been published before.”Such data has not been published since the first days of Trump’s second term in the White House, said Reichlin-Melnick, as the president has ramped up deportation operations and federal agents have violently carried out his anti-immigration agenda—arresting more than 10,000 people in a recent five-day span and killing at least 11 people during enforcement operations.In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum wrote that over 10 years, the team he managed at OHSS grew from 11 people to 45 people under the Biden administration.“We matured official data processing to update monthly,” wrote Rosenblum. “We launched new lines of daily and weekly internal reports. We massively expanded our analytic capacity.”“My OHSS co-workers are outstanding career federal civil servants. They are smart, mission-focused experts who produce high-quality results in a challenging and often hostile work environment,” he continued. “But it will come as no surprise that I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration. Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”Daniel Delgado, a former DHS deputy assistant secretary for immigration policy, said the department was “far better off for the work that Marc accomplished, no matter how hard the current incompetent leadership try to hide it.”David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute—which has found that the majority of immigration arrests made last year were of people who had no criminal convictions—told NOTUS last November that under the Trump administration, DHS was providing “no accountability, no way to assess, no public understanding about what’s really going on that is not curated by a press release from the agency.”Reichlin-Melnick has also frequently spoken out about the lack of data being publicly released by DHS to back up its claims about immigration arrests.While DHS has repeatedly claimed in public statements that its agents are getting “the worst of the worst off our streets,” the agency’s own “Worst of the Worst” database released late last year showed less than 10,000 people who had been arrested—a tiny fraction of the 220,000 people who had been detained by federal agents up to that point.“Marc Rosenblum was one of the most dedicated civil servants I’ve ever met, a man who spent his career working to get DHS to share more data,” said Reichlin-Melnick. “Since Trump took office last year, his office has been repeatedly blocked from sharing previously public data.”
President Donald Trump has run out of time, and he doesn't appear to know it yet. The president took to Truth Social earlier this month after his failed ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court over birthright citizenship. "Signs and Billboards are being put up all over our Southern Border, and Mexico, advertising birthright citizenship, with 'deliveries starting at $4,000.' Likewise, similar signs are going up all over our country. Billions of dollars will be illegally made by this scam, with citizenship going to anyone willing to pay," Trump said with his random capitalizations. "It will be by far, the number one way of becoming a citizen, and then the entire family will be allowed to follow. Not sustainable ... In fact, that is a crime, and therefore, the Supreme Court's ruling is wrong. I will be asking for rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, immediately. This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don't change their absolutely insane decision. Thank you for your attention to this matter," the message read.As William and Mary law professor Jonathan H. Adler explained, Trump's demand hit a brick wall."The deadline has passed, and the Docket does not indicate any petition was filed," he wrote on X.com. SCOTUS Wire explained, "Rule 44 allows 25 days to seek rehearing. It requires the support of at least one Justice from the majority, and is rarely granted."The Supreme Court decision was handed down on June 30 and Tuesday marks 28 days since the ruling. Trump is officially outside the rule. Trump and his allies continue to make claims about birth tourism, saying that women who are eight months pregnant either fly or walk across the U.S. border to give birth. That claim was cited by Solicitor General John Sauer in oral arguments in April. Chief Justice John Roberts asked Sauer how often this is happening. Sauer responded, "No one knows for sure."Trump alleged that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing this each year."In 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates low immigration, estimated the possible number of birth tourism cases at 20,000 to 26,000 per year. For context, there were 3.61 million births in the U.S. that year," explained FactCheck.org.
President Donald Trump's negotiations with Iran have even stumped Fox News, The New Republic reported.Fox News host Brian Kilmeade grilled Trump during an interview Tuesday after the president had claimed talks were underway "right now," despite Iran’s foreign ministry saying the country has no interest in direct talks."We hear that you’re talking right now with leaders on Iran,” Kilmeade told Trump. “But Iran has come out publicly and said ‘we’re not talking to the U.S.—""Well, they just came out and said ‘we are talking’ a little while ago," Trump said, interjecting Kilmeade's comment. "So could you tell me who you’re talking to, Mr. President?" Kilmeade asked.Trump avoided directly answering the question."For some reason, we can be in the midst of a beautiful discussion, and they’ll come out and say 'we’re not talking' or 'we didn’t discuss nuclear,'" Trump said. "Well, that’s all we discussed, because they’ll never have a nuclear weapon, they understand that. We’ve had some very good talks."Trump then shifted the conversation to the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). "It does not inspire confidence when the president can’t confidently say who he has been in contact with while supposedly trying to negotiate an end to his increasingly unpopular and expensive war," The New Republic reported. "This conversation came after a recent pause in violence in the region, and ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Tuesday—in which he most likely lobbied Trump to start bombing Iran again."KILMEADE: We hear that you're talking with leaders from Iran. But Iran has come out publicly and said 'we're not talking to the US'TRUMP: Well, they just came out and said we are talkingKILMEADE: So could you tell me who you're talking to?TRUMP: We've had some very good… pic.twitter.com/bAqKISTbjU— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 28, 2026
The U.S. walked out as France addressed a United Nations Security Council meeting on Ukraine on Monday (July 27), accusing its longtime ally of “disingenuous grandstanding” over French comments comparing the U.S. to North Korea, Russia and other authoritarian states regarding votes on human rights issues.
