Ian Welsh

Howie Klein, May 2, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, was even stronger on the same particular crime: “Never before in American history have foreign governments, as well as people and corporations under investigation, so overtly and directly funneled vast sums to the president of the United States and his family. This is far more than is captured by the term ‘conflict of interest.’ It is foreign policy for sale and justice for sale. And, as one of the executives in the deal said, ‘it is only the beginning.’ With a president who has no regard for the basic norms of propriety, ethics, the law or the U.S. Constitution, the question is: Will the U.S. Congress permit this mockery of the American people? Or will it insist on the most minimal baseline standards, so that foreign governments cannot send money directly to the president and his family?”

Public Records Wreckers: The consequences of gutting FOIA offices are both obvious and unknowable.

Will Royce, Andrea Beaty, May 1, 2025 [The American Prospect]

Ten months ago, Roman Jankowski sent dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), among other agencies. He was one-third of a three-man fishing expedition spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and the Daily Caller to dig up dirt on civil servants, particularly if they were the type to use phrases like “climate equity” or “voting.” ….

Today, Jankowski oversees FOIA compliance for DHS as its chief FOIA officer. His agency receives more public records requests than any other by a wide margin. And instead of gumming up FOIA administration from the outside, Jankowski now works for an administration that is attacking FOIA by firing many of the federal employees who respond to those requests, precisely what his records requests sought to facilitate….

While the administration staunchly refuses to be “maximally transparent,” groups like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) are trying to get answers. CREW is currently suing the Trump administration for refusing to comply with its FOIA requests on DOGE’s activities. To prop up their argument that DOGE and Musk aren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the administration has claimed that Musk doesn’t work for DOGE—despite Trump’s personal posts and a basic comprehension of daily news contradicting that idea—and that the roughly 100 operatives under Musk’s direction are not acting independently from the office of the president.

The Democracy Index

Joyce Vance, Joshua Kolb, Lily Conway, and Bri Murphy, May 02, 2025

This week, the Trump DOJ was dealt two significant blows by two Republican-appointed district court judges. On Thursday in Texas, Trump-appointee Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., ruled that the Trump Administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act—a 1798 law that allows the government to detain and deport noncitizens from the country during wartime—was improper and unlawful. Rodriguez, Jr., ruled that Trump’s proclamation “exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”

Earlier in the week, Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia, who was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, lambasted the Trump Administration, preventing Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from being decimated and ruling that “It is hard to fathom a more straightforward display of arbitrary and capricious actions than the Defendants’ actions here.” Lamberth then took an extraordinary step back from the particulars of the case to strongly defend the independence of the judiciary in our constitutional system, writing: “By enjoining the defendants’ efforts to dismantle the plaintiff networks, actions which I perceive to be contrary to the law, I am humbly fulfilling my small part in this very constitutional paradigm—a framework that has propelled the U.S. to heights of greatness, liberty and prosperity unparalleled in the history of the world for nearly 250 years. If our nation is to thrive for another 250 years, each co-equal branch of government must be willing to courageously exert the authority entrusted to it by our Founders.”

Beyond the judiciary, institutions that bent the knee to Trump faced setbacks while those that held resolutely against intimidation were rewarded. Notably, Microsoft, one of the largest companies in the world, dropped the law firm Simpson Thacher—among the shops that caved and made a deal with the Trump White House—and signed up Jenner Block, one of the three law firms that challenged Trump’s Executive Order in court. The cowardly firms that acquiesced cited, as their prime justification, their obligation to their clients to maintain good relations with the government. That was always a false choice, but it was also foolhardy in the long run—after all, what client wants a lawyer who will be intimidated by its bad-faith adversary?

That is indeed courageous, a fact that can be quantified. In the law firms’ litigation against the Trump Administration, hundreds of firms banded together to sign an amicus brief defending their colleagues and decrying the president’s Executive Order. The first amicus brief a couple weeks ago, supporting Perkins Coie’s lawsuit, secured about five hundred firms; this week, another amicus brief in the Jenner Block suit garnered around eight hundred signatories.