Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Trump’s Justice Department is botching grand jury cases so badly that federal judges are openly accusing prosecutors of misconduct. The $500 gold Trump phone is being ripped to shreds by tech reviewers. Republicans in Congress are running out of time to pass their agenda before the midterms. A sitting U.S. Senator was pepper-sprayed by ICE agents outside an immigration detention center in New Jersey.
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Trump’s Justice Department Gets Exposed By Grand Juries
Grand juries are supposed to be one of the most serious and sacred parts of the American legal system. They’re where prosecutors present evidence in secret, and they carry enormous power to bring criminal charges against citizens. It’s a process that demands precision, restraint, and, above all, honesty.
Under Trump, that process is breaking down.
Over the past several months, federal prosecutors have failed repeatedly to convince grand juries to return indictments. These failures, called “no true bills” in legal terms, used to be almost unheard of. Prosecutors have so much control in the grand jury room that a failure to get an indictment was seen as a signal that something was deeply wrong with the case. Now they’re happening with alarming frequency in cities across the country. These cases are almost always involving immigration protests and people Trump views as political opponents.
The Founders put grand juries into the Fifth Amendment for one reason, folks. They’d watched King George’s prosecutors haul colonists into Star Chamber proceedings on trumped-up political charges, and they wanted a citizen check between the government and the accused. When that check starts firing back “no true bill” again and again, it’s the grand jury system doing exactly what John Adams and James Madison designed it to do.
But prosecutors failing to get a grand jury indictment is only the tip of the iceberg.
Federal judges have now admonished Justice Department prosecutors at least three times since last November for outright misconduct in how they’ve handled grand juries. The most recent case happened in Chicago, where a judge named April Perry threw out charges against four activists accused of impeding police during an ICE protest. When she examined the grand jury transcripts, she found a list of violations that she described as unlike anything she’d seen in reviewing hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts over her career.
Prosecutors had spoken to grand jurors outside the grand jury room, which is a major breach of protocol. They’d coached those jurors to believe the evidence was particularly strong. They’d removed jurors from the panel who had previously voted against them. And then they tried to hide all of it by redacting the transcripts, until the judge ordered them to hand over the full, unredacted versions.
It wasn’t an isolated incident. Out in Wyoming, a panel of three federal judges threw out nine indictments, including murder cases, after finding that the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney there had walked into the grand jury room before testimony began and told jurors they were about to hear about “bad guys” and “murderers.” He handed out his business cards to jurors during a break. He bragged that the last grand jury in that courthouse had returned an indictment in just three minutes.
That U.S. attorney, Darin Smith, had never prosecuted a case before taking this job. He’d been a state senator and an executive at the Christian Broadcasting Network. The judges ruled he’d tainted the grand juries. Their ruling came out on May 15. Three days later, the Senate confirmed his nomination anyway.
Think about what that Senate vote tells us. Three federal judges, appointed across different administrations, unanimously found this man had corrupted the grand jury process and gotten murder cases thrown out as a result. And the Republican Senate said, we don’t care, confirm him anyway. That’s not advice and consent. That’s a rubber stamp on prosecutorial misconduct.
And in the James Comey case, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Virginia, a former insurance lawyer with no prosecutorial experience, walked into the grand jury room alone on her fourth day on the job and later had to admit in open court that she’d never shown the grand jury the final version of the indictment they were supposed to have approved.
What ties all of these cases together is what legal experts have been saying for months. Trump has demanded charges against people he views as enemies, and he’s put rookie prosecutors in charge of making those charges happen because of their political loyalty. And judges have had enough of the DOJ’s cut-rate prosecutors who cut corners and break rules.
As former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade put it, if the Justice Department demonstrates it isn’t worthy of trust, it invites judges to look under the hood.
This is what the slow-motion conversion of a Justice Department into a personal prosecution service looks like in real time, folks. Richard Nixon tried to do a version of this with his enemies list, and Elliot Richardson resigned rather than carry it out. Today’s loyalists don’t resign. They just hand out business cards to grand jurors.
Reviewers Are Destroying the Trump Phone
The $500 gold Trump Mobile smartphone has finally landed in the hands of tech reviewers, and the verdict is not good.
This phone was announced a year ago and hard-launched to MAGA supporters nine months ago. Patrick Holland, the managing editor of CNET, reviewed it on CNN this week after spending a day testing it, and he didn’t pull punches.
Holland said the phone looks “nothing like the original image” that was used to promote it. The actual product looks considerably less premium. As for the gold color that’s supposed to be the phone’s whole brand identity? Holland said it had “a mustard vibe to it.” He also characterized it as similar to “a urine sample.”
The screen is smaller than advertised. The phone is not made in America, despite that being a major selling point. The packaging says it was “designed with American values in mind,” which is doing a lot of heavy lifting. According to CNET, its processor performance matches that of a common Taiwanese phone.
Holland also found that the American flag etched into the back has 11 stripes instead of 13. It comes with Trump’s Nazi-infested social media app pre-installed. The selfie camera automatically filters photos. And Holland said he has serious concerns about whether most customers who already paid will ever actually receive their phones.
The CEO of Trump Mobile told CNN that the technology business is “more difficult than some may realize” and that high demand is slowing down fulfillment. At $500 a unit, that’s a tough line to sell.
This is the oldest grift in American history, folks. P.T. Barnum sold mermaid skeletons stitched together from monkey parts and fish tails to people who wanted to believe. The Founders worried so much about a president using his office to fleece his own supporters that they wrote the emoluments clauses right into Article I and Article II of the Constitution. A sitting president slapping his name on a Chinese-made phone with the wrong number of stripes on the flag and selling it to working people for $500 is exactly the kind of self-dealing they were trying to prevent.
Republicans Running Out of Time to Pass Bills
There’s a clock ticking on Capitol Hill, and Republicans are starting to feel it.
The party has been struggling with its big party-line ICE funding bill, and now leadership is facing a harder reality. There’s not that much legislative floor time left before the midterms.
The Senate is scheduled to be in session for just eight weeks before the August recess, then three weeks in the fall before November. The House gets ten weeks before the election. That’s not a lot of runway for a party trying to push through significant legislation.
And the list of things that need to get done is long.
Congress needs to extend expiring surveillance powers by June 12. There’s an October government shutdown that needs to be avoided. There are Iran war powers resolutions to deal with. $70 billion in proposed ICE funding is stalled. The Senate still needs to figure out its approach to the House-passed E15 gas sales bill. Surface transportation and farm bill extensions are due in September. And then there’s the ongoing reconciliation process, which several Republican senators are insisting is “too important to not do.”
Look at that list and tell me what’s missing. Healthcare. Wages. Childcare. Housing affordability. The cost of insulin is on there only because Bernie Sanders has been hammering it for a decade. Everything else on the docket either expands surveillance, funds ICE, or rewrites the rules to benefit whoever has the biggest lobbyist on K Street. This is what happens when one party answers exclusively to its donor class.
On top of all of that, there are ongoing negotiations on cryptocurrency regulation, housing legislation, college sports rules, and a push to lower insulin prices. That’s a lot of moving parts for a legislative calendar that’s running thin.
James Lankford of Oklahoma, who is the fifth-highest ranking Republican senator, told Semafor that Republicans are going to have to make some hard choices about what gets prioritized and what gets left behind. And with the midterms approaching, every decision is being made through the lens of what helps or hurts the GOP’s chances come November.
A U.S. Senator Got Pepper-Sprayed by ICE
Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey went to Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark, on Monday. Inmates there had launched a hunger strike to protest spoiled and rotten food, inadequate medical care and inhumane living conditions.
Kim came out of the facility and walked into a tense scene. ICE had deployed an armored vehicle and a line of armed officers in tactical vests. A crowd of protesters gathered outside.
Kim, trying to prevent a physical confrontation, put himself between the two groups to de-escalate the situation. ICE told him they needed to move a vehicle through the crowd. When the vehicle started to move, Kim ran to put himself between the protesters and the agents. That’s when ICE agents started shooting chemical weapons and tackling people in the crowd, with Senator Kim getting a faceful of pepper spray.
Article I of the Constitution makes United States senators part of a coequal branch of government with explicit oversight authority over federal agencies. Pepper-spraying a sitting senator who is doing his constitutional duty isn’t a crowd control incident. It’s a federal agency telling the people’s representatives that they answer to the executive alone. That’s the same logic that built the secret police in every authoritarian regime of the 20th century.
Video posted to social media showed Kim having his eyes flushed with a water bottle. He later said his eyes and throat were burning and his hand was hurting.
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill was also there. She’d listened to families describe the conditions their loved ones were being held in, requested access to the facility, and been denied. She left before ICE escalated.
The Department of Homeland Security put out a statement claiming no one was “directly struck by pepper ball projectiles.” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin called the whole thing “nothing more than a political stunt by New Jersey sanctuary politicians for fundraising clicks” and insisted there was no hunger strike and no subprime conditions at Delaney Hall.
Kim said he wished Mullin had called him before making those claims. And he insisted that conditions at the facility are “inhumane,” calling the entire system “so broken on so many different fronts.”
A sitting U.S. senator getting pepper-sprayed while trying to de-escalate a standoff at a federal immigration detention facility. That’s where we are in Trump’s America.
Dwight Eisenhower warned us in his farewell address about the rise of a vast military and security apparatus that could outgrow democratic control. He couldn’t have imagined an armored ICE vehicle rolling toward a U.S. senator outside a private detention facility on American soil. But here we are, watching the warning come true in real time.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
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