I just heard the news that Gordon Wood, a towering figure in the scholarship of Early American history, died yesterday at 92. Adding more upset to the news is the fact that he died after being struck by a car in East Providence. He died later in a Providence hospital. (One knows that people in their 90s are in the last years of their lives; a violent death like that makes it more of a gut punch.)

As I’ve mentioned a few times over the years Wood was my dissertation advisor at Brown. So he played an important role in my life. What ended up being my area of specialty, the topic of my dissertation, was pretty distant from the focus of his scholarship. He was concerned with the decades surrounding the American Revolution and the early Republic. My focus was on the middle 17th century and the interplay between economic interactions and inter-communal violence between English settlers and the Indians of Southern New England. In a way he indulged my interest in these questions that were pretty distant from his. He had very little time for cant or jargon or, as he saw it, theory.

From TPM Reader BP …

As a Mainer, I have been waiting (and waiting and waiting:-) for you to weigh in on Platner, since I respect your opinion so much and this whole thing has been crazy. I have been amazed at the over the top reactions and use of new info to verify black and white priors from so many in the media and on socials.  Most of that is from people outside Maine. In my little corner here:

1. Mainers REALLY respect the hard work Platner is putting in. Quiet hard work is highly valued here.  It’s not just 80 town halls. He goes anywhere and everywhere to talk with any group that invites him, walks any picket line he’s invited to. It’s probably hundreds of meetings, town halls, and just showing up for a cause at this point in the campaign. He appears with other candidates to boost their visibility, and has helped the three best candidates (in my opinion) form a ranked choice coalition in the tight governor’s race.

From TPM Reader JO …

There are a few local data points your Platner piece doesn’t mention that may become important.

1. Mills is still on the ballot, and she’s been making a point of saying so since the first article about the sexts came out. Her lawn signs, which had largely disappeared, are springing back up all over town with reminders about that. She sees an opening, she’s trying to exploit it, and she has a receptive audience.

Kate and I discussed the ongoing Graham Platner controversies on last week’s episode the podcast. As I explained, having never fallen hard for Platner as so many did, I come at the matter from a different perspective. I was basically a soft skeptic. Not against him, but also not wowed. Because of that, I wasn’t really let down by any of the scandals because I wasn’t up in the first place. As I half-jokingly put it, as long as he agrees not to be a Nazi going forward and stays off any dating apps until November, I’m basically fine with this candidacy.

In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaakov Roth, said that yes, President Trump could decide tomorrow to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and no one could stop him.

Welcome back to Aakash Singh Points Memo. It turns out there’s even more. Earlier I mentioned the growing evidence that Singh is the point man, the conduit for White House/DOJ orders to corrupt grand juries and bring political retaliation indictments. But there’s so much more.

Yesterday the Times reported that on May 13 the DOJ convened a teleconference with most or all U.S. attorneys or senior assistant U.S. attorneys around the country to demand more prosecutions of non-citizen voters. The problem, of course, is that countless official tabulations, even in red states under Republican officials, have shown that such voting is close to non-existent, as TPM has reported literally for decades.

In recent posts I’ve been explaining how corrupt leadership of the Justice Department has been seeping down into U.S. Attorneys Offices across the country, sometimes through direct interventions, other times through the general message from the top that using U.S. Attorneys Offices to settle personal vendettas is fine. Our new information comes from a new filing out of the Broadview Six case — specifically, from attorneys for the final four defendants who are now seeking leave of the court to do discovery to get to the bottom of the corruption behind the case and seek sanctions or compensation for legal fees.

First, a little context.

Graham Platner’s scandals just keep piling up. This week, news emerged that the likely Democratic nominee to face off against Susan Collins in the Maine Senate race had sexted with several women who were not his wife shortly before he launched his campaign. The New York Times followed up with a piece talking to several women who alleged that had volatile and “toxic” relationships with Platner. This is, of course, after reports emerged that he has a Nazi symbol tattoo. (Platner denied knowing about the tattoo’s significance when he got it as a Marine years ago, and got it covered up during the campaign).

TPM executive editor John Light, publisher Joe Ragazzo and reporter Kate Riga got together to talk it all through. Check it out below.

I’ve been bringing you updates on the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago, the current U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros and the expanding grand jury misconduct corruption scandal enveloping the office. Of course, this is not limited to Chicago. It’s highly likely, though defense attorneys haven’t yet been able to pry free evidence, that the Broadview Six indictment came down under pressure from Washington, whether that was from the White House, Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security. The deeper corruption of the DOJ is a story me and my colleagues have been reporting on for the last year and a half — cover-ups, retaliation against political adversaries, various flavors of corrupt and criminal conduct.

So it’s everywhere. It’s starts at the top and it trickles down everywhere. But in most cases we’re talking about corruption and misconduct directed from above, from Trump and his top fluffers. But the DOJ is a big, big institution. Lots of people. There are 93 U.S. Attorneys Offices. So there are many flavors of corruption. And I wanted to share with you a slightly different kind. This is courtesy of TPM Reader LS who shared this article from Bloomberg Law (which David also flagged in Morning Memo today). It’s about Sigal Chattah, the acting U.S. Attorney in Nevada’s single U.S. Attorney’s office. It’s a wild, wild article. Totally bonkers stuff I was surprised I hadn’t heard about before. But it kind of makes sense since it’s hard to get attention for wild levels of corruption and misconduct and simply absurd behavior in a semi-out-of-the-way U.S. Attorneys office when we’re seeing examples of the same every day at Main Justice.

Anyway, here’s the story.

Former U.S. Border Patrol Commander-At-Large Greg Bovino is best known for his lead role in White House’s lethal immigration sweeps across America and for his famous Nazi SS-style trench coat. So it’s not exactly a surprise that he is spending his retirement doing interviews with avowed anti-semites and attending extremist conferences.

Still, it’s worth taking a close look at who, exactly, one of the people Trump selected as a top American immigration official is rubbing shoulders with, and what these people represent. Freelance journalist and author of “To Catch a Fascist” Chris Mathias broke down Bovino’s recent attendance at the “Remigration Summit” in Portugal with TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo on Substack Live.

For more from Chris, check out his full TPM piece on Bovino’s pals and an excerpt from his book that we ran earlier this year: “What an Antifa Activist Learned While Undercover With Patriot Front.”