A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
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Trump Retribution: As Corrupt as It Gets
The Trump administration is corruptly targeting Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) with criminal investigation using the same tactic it has used against New York Attorney General Letitia James: allegations of mortgage fraud.
Fannie Mae has reportedly made a criminal referral against Schiff to the Trump Justice Department. President Trump happily touted the news about his former impeacher on social media.
In any other era, this would be the defining story of the day. The President of the United States running the DOJ out of his White House and using it to launch politically motivated criminal investigations of his Democratic foes.
Trump’s not targeting just any Democrats. He’s targeting precisely who he has promised to target: Democrats who came after him. James, among other things, won that massive $300+ million fraud case against the Trump Org. Schiff, then in the House, was the lead prosecutor in the first Trump impeachment and has continued to be a chief Trump antagonist.
We don’t have to peel back the layers of the underlying mortgage fraud allegations. Why was the the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae, looking at James and Schiff in the first place? Just out of the blue, we’re supposed to believe?
The WaPo obtained from an anonymous administration official a confidential Fannie Mae memo address to Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte: “The memo said that on May 12, Fannie’s financial crimes investigations unit received a document demand from FHFA’s inspector general concerning Schiff’s home, including requests for loan files and other documents.”
We all know what’s going on here.
In Other Trump DOJ News …
- Criminal defense lawyers have been lobbying the Trump DOJ’s “Weaponization Working Group” to try to get their clients off the hook, Bloomberg reports. In an ironic twist, the attorney for the Utah plastic surgeon accused of selling false Covid vaccination cards said the group turned her down when she asked it to intervene. It was only later, when pressure was building over the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory, that Attorney General Pam Bondi abruptly dismissed the case against the doctor.
- After the federal judges in the Northern District of New York declined to extend the interim term of U.S. Attorney John A. Sarcone III, the Trump administration has orchestrated things (legally, I think) so that Sarcone may continue in the role for a limited period.
‘Legalistic Noncompliance’
University of Michigan law professors Daniel Deacon and Leah Litman have a new legal research paper out (I promise to only rarely inflict legal research papers on you) that tries to give some shape and form to the Trump administration’s defiance of court orders. They dub the practice “legalistic noncompliance” and observe how it has manifested itself on the ground in the three ways:
In the first, the executive deploys specious arguments—arguments that seem facially plausible but in fact lack support—in order to evade enforcement of judicial orders. The second involves employing tactics, including legal-sounding claims that certain information cannot be shared, as a way to impede investigation into whether the administration is in fact complying. The third consists of occasions where the administration has, in the face of a judicial order, used different legal means in order to effect a policy substantially similar to the one enjoined.
Texas Walkout Redux?
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and DNC Chair Ken Martin held a conference call Monday night with 40 Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives and while they stopped short of asking them to walk out of the special session later this month to block a Republican redistricting scheme, “they left the impression that it should be considered,” the NYT reports. Texas Democrats famously fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum during the mid-decade redistricting fiasco of 2003.
It’s not just Texas, where Republicans hope a newly drawn map will help them pick up five additional seats. “There could be some other states we’re going to get another three, or four or five in addition. Texas would be the biggest one.” President Trump said yesterday.
Anything to hold on to the House and not lose the GOP’s trifecta of White House, Senate, and House control.
Census Citizenship Question Is Baaack
The census citizenship issue is raising its head again. House Republicans have introduced three bills this year that would exclude noncitizens for the purposes of apportioning House seats and Electoral College votes, NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang reports. The census citizenship push during President Trump’s first term was foiled by legal challenges.
W. Virginia Abortion Pill Ban Upheld
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld West Virginia’s near-total ban on the abortion pill mifepristone. “The decision marks the first time a federal appeals court has allowed a state to strictly limit the drug, teeing up a key test of states’ powers to ban medication approved by the Food and Drug Administration,” the WaPo reports.
Medicaid Cuts Already Start to Bite
Hospitals are closing or actively considering doing so, cutting programs, and laying off staff. Planned Parenthood is warning patients it can no longer accept Medicaid insurance and in one region says it can’t provide services to Medicaid recipients at all, even if the patient doesn’t use Medicaid to pay. And lawmakers in at least five states are planning special sessions to revamp their already-enacted budgets and determine how to handle the cuts, including what cuts they should enact and how to administer the new Medicaid work requirement.
Trump Attack on Higher Ed: Wolverines Edition
- University of Michigan: In its trumped up “investigation” of foreign donations, the Trump administration has made an extensive and invasive demand for records, including “personnel files on university students and employees, records on research projects, tax records and records on other partnerships with foreign universities, governments and other entities,” the NYT reports.
- Columbia University: The university could settle with the Trump administration as soon as next week, paying hundred of millions of dollars in fines and implement various “reforms” to re-start cut off federal funding, the NYT reports.
- George Mason University: The Trump administration has opened two anti-DEI investigations into the public university in Virginia, after it helped force the resignation of the president of the University of Virginia.
A Report From the Academic Trenches
Those of us not in academia and far removed from student life may not fully appreciate how grim things have become on campus. President Trump’s attack on higher education is a big part of the story, but it’s just one of the dramatic changes that have swept universities. Political scientist Paul Musgrave wrote a thoughtful essay to try to convey to non-academics the scale and scope of the changes:
I find it hard to explain to people who are unfamiliar with academia or how scholarship actually works how devastating these changes are. These disruptions, cumulatively, seem—from my perspective—to be more dramatic in their effects in a far shorter time than the impact of computerization and the Internet on higher education. Moreover, there does not seem to be any reason to think that U.S. policymakers are concerned with, or even sad about, any of these changes. To the contrary: they are pouring gasoline on the flames. Warnings about the risks and long-term effects fall on ears deafened by an ideology that says that those consequences are desirable or by an incapacity to imagine that actions have consequences.
Meanwhile, in the Fox News Alt-Universe …
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