ALEXANDRIA, VA—This morning’s hearing on James Comey’s motion to dismiss for vindictive and selective prosecution was largely overshadowed by the revelation that the indictment may not be valid because it was botched by interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan. You can read my initial report from court here.
It would be an epic way for the weaponized prosecution of Comey to end: the Trump loyalist with no prosecutorial experience so badly mishandling the basic nuts and bolts of grand jury practice that no indictment ever attached to Comey.
But a botched indictment only indirectly gets at the heart of the bad faith and ill motive that is driving the Comey prosecution, so let’s run through some of the highlights of the nearly hour-long argument that preceded U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff pressing prosecutors for answers on their mishandling of the grand jury. Instead of recounting the arguments from both sides — former deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben for Comey and Nathaniel Lemons for the government — I want to zoom in on what most interested the judge and where his questions were most focused.
Yesterday President Trump met in the Oval Office with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and, in the midst of defending him over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said that MBS “knew nothing about it.” Last night Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-VA) went to the well of the House and gave a brief speech in which he said that the two most troubling presidential calls he had reviewed while serving on the National Security Council staff were the infamous one with President Zelenskyy and another heretofore unknown call with MBS. Vindman then goes on to imply that the call showed Trump not knew MBS ordered the murder but likely supported it. Vindman first posted the video on Twitter last night. This morning he posted the same video on Bluesky. But in the caption he writes in the post — as opposed to the video — he zeroes in specifically on Trump’s claim that MBS “knew nothing about it.”
A few TPM readers responded to yesterday’s post about Trump as the “weak horse” arguing that Trump’s waning power makes him more dangerous, not less. I agree. Mostly. What’s “more dangerous” is a subjective question, with different kinds of dangers, different time horizons. Overall it’s clearly a good thing since Trump’s loss of power and the eventual defeat of his movement are good things. Though that’s far from a certainty, it is getting more likely. But Trump won’t go quietly. We know that from Jan. 6. No president wants to see their popularity wane or the loss of power that goes with it. But Trump’s binary mental world puts a sharper, more draconian focus on everything. In his world, you are punishing or the punished, dominating or the dominated. Loss of power means personal political peril. That’s how it works in his own head, and to a significant degree Trump’s own actions have made that all-or-nothing world a reality around him.
UPDATE: The wider issue seems resolved, and we’ve restored member services.
Original post: An internet-wide Cloudflare issue has made access to TPM a bit shaky this morning. While the wider issue is being resolved and to ensure you can access TPM, we’ve disabled member services temporarily. Don’t be alarmed if you can’t sign in to TPM; you should still be able to read TPM. We’ll restore member services as soon as the underlying issue, which is outside of our control, is resolved.
I try not to share ideas or theories that I suspect, by the odds, are not likely true. But sometimes I’m curious enough about one that I want to share it with that proviso. Here’s one. Like almost everyone else, I’ve being trying to make sense of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent arc. Mostly I’ve come up totally dry. I can’t make sense of it. I’ve seen various theories, that she’s making a long play for the future leadership of the post-Trump MAGA movement or other cunning and ambition-driven theories. But none of them really explain what I’ve seen.
One of my instrument panel watchwords for understanding politics is that all power is unitary. In the case of presidents, you don’t have one bundle of power in one area and a siloed, distinct and unaffected bundle in another. A president’s power is a uniform commodity wherever he reaches. What boosts it or drags it down in one area affects it everywhere else. That’s the best way to understand President Trump’s position 10 months into his second term. It’s hard to know whether it was the five-week government shutdown which focused public attention on draconian cuts to health care, the election night shellacking, the first signs of MAGA diehards defecting from the president, the grotesque and absurd Epstein cat-and-mouse game or a dozen other comparable examples. What makes it both hard to pick apart the different drivers of a president’s decline and perilous for the president himself is that the different drivers feed on themselves. They become both cause and effect in a mounting spiral.
WASHINGTON, DC—After months of delays, a federal judge is prepared to swiftly proceed with a contempt of court inquiry in the original Alien Enemies Act case.
Take a trip into the Wayback machine in this bonus episode, as part of TPM’s 25th Anniversary! Executive Editor John Light and Deputy Editor for News Nicole Lafond co-moderate a panel with current and former TPMers, including TPM editor-at-large David Kurtz, ProPublica reporter Paul Kiel, NOTUS reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro, and The Cut feature editor Catherine Thompson. They provide a kind of oral history of the past 25 years of TPM.
