Latest on Reflecting Pool Debacle:

The falsely-charged “vandal” has just filed an important motion in the case after the U.S. Attorney dismissed his felony charges “without prejudice” — meaning they could charge him again. That dismissal “without prejudice” I’d say was a mistake, as it teed up this motion, to dismiss his charges “with prejudice” so he cannot be charged again. That response was foreseeable, and now the defense lawyers have pounced.

Why did the Reflecting Pool cases blow up? Thank Brady v. Maryland, a Supreme Court case requiring that any exculpatory information the government has be turned over to the defense. A Brady violation is a big deal at DOJ (See Justice Manual 9-5.001). ⬇️ Prosecutors were headed for a huge Brady violation, with professional discipline to worry about; plus they’d been hornswoggled by Interior, Parks and Park Police. One thing for Burgum to lie on Fox News; not cool for prosecutor in court.

Interestinger and interestinger: Remember the Florida federal court inquiry into whether the crooked slush fund and sleazy Trump family tax fraud amnesty deal was a “fraud on the court”? Major development down there!

🧵 Start by recalling that fraud on the court is really bad — worse than contempt; so bad that from our research no senior DOJ official in history has ever been accused of it, let alone subjected to a judicial inquiry. That fraud question remains pending in the court.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave . . . .” AG nominee Todd Blanche is snarled deep in a tangled web of his own making, and he and Republicans are covering up the messy tangle. That won’t last. The mess is too thick. The stink is too rank.

🧵 1. Everybody hates both Trump’s crooked slush fund AND the crooked Trump family tax fraud amnesty, so Blanche weaseled a false answer that the slush fund was “DEAD.” But he wouldn’t put in writing. That’s a tell in general, and with lawyers’ weasel words in particular.

Big 3:

Here are the Big Three problems we need to keep in focus, problems which have corroded our democracy, and need urgent repair to restore government “of the People, by the People, and for the People”: 1.  Get the rotten dark money out of our politics. I’ve watched dark money redirect Congress away from voters, instead to big special interests with the motives and means to feed the big, crooked dark money machine.

Now that the smoke has mostly cleared from Canada’s wildfires, let’s try to clear some of the bogus smoke ABOUT Canada’s wildfires, particularly Trump’s fossil-fuel-friendly denial that climate change has anything to do with it. Is it “bad forest management”? Canada’s forest is over 900 million acres. The entire continental US is 1.9 billion acres. They’re supposed to “manage” a forest half the size of the whole Lower 48? Grow a brain.

Well, I told you to watch the Florida proceedings about whether a “fraud on the court” was committed in the slush fund case, and we now have the federal judge’s decision, and it’s a doozy.

Here’s how she framed the question:

🧵 Whether Trump and the defendants “ignored ethical norms, court rules, and legal authority to manipulate the judicial process …. to gild their efforts to gain unprecedented access to the public fisc with the patina of legitimacy.”

For most of our American history, Congress set up agencies and commissions to deal with complex and specialized questions. 

We made them expert, independent and often bipartisan. 

Every single one of the fifty states has done the same at some point.

It worked.

🧵 Expertise helped them resist being tricked by industry. Independence (“quasi,” anyway) helped them resist corrupt influence. 

Bipartisanship steadied the ship. Yup, it worked. 

America became a global leader in regulated areas (securities and pharmaceuticals, e.g.).

A new chapter in a sordid saga opened this week with the DC Circuit agreeing to reconsider, en banc, the decision of a 2-1 divided panel regarding contempt of court at senior levels of the MAGA DOJ. 

The full DC Circuit will now weigh in.

🧵 This began with the midnight deportations ordered halted by Judge Boasberg, which continued anyway. In that matter, MAGA DOJ thug Emil Bove reportedly said lawyers should be ready to tell the judge to “f*** off.”

We have a President who is petrified of the truth getting out about his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Many questions remain.

🧵
nytimes.com/2026/06/10/mag… Lisa Bloom, who likely knows as much as anyone about the credibility of the accusations against Trump, says “the man who is mentioned probably more than anyone else in the Epstein files should be subpoenaed to testify: Donald Trump.”
thedailybeast.com/lawyer-for-don…

When Trump thug lawyer Emil Bove joined the MAGA Justice Department, he quickly became involved in three instances of likely prosecutorial misconduct.

One of them caught the attention of a federal judge as potential contempt of court.

🧵 When the judge scheduled a hearing to look into whether contempt of court had been committed by the MAGA DOJ, two Trump judges on the DC Circuit court suddenly stayed those contempt proceedings. (The dissent is worth reading.)

Todd Blanche was behind the Epstein Files cover-up, the rotten cop-beaters slush fund, and a sleazy tax fraud amnesty for the Trump family and businesses; all while causing an unprecedented "fraud on the court" investigation of the Department... 🧵 ... pursuing illegal U.S. Attorney appointments, having courts regularly throw out indictments and grand juries return "no bills," and costing the Department its customary "presumption of regularity."

He is a walking disgrace.

Even if crooked Trumpsters try to weasel their way back out of their rotten ‘cop-beaters slush fund’ deal, they still have to deal with the equally rotten Trump family business-and-personal tax/crimes amnesty. This ain’t over until ALL of it goes away.

But wait, there’s more! 🧵 If this was schemed up via a “fraud on the court” (now the subject of a federal judicial inquiry), that fraud on the court is complete, and dumpstering the slush fund and tax amnesty doesn’t make that fraud go away, any more than returning the jewels makes a robbery go away.

Want to know how we blew up the billion-dollar ballroom?

Let me take you into the parliamentary “reconciliation” challenge.

🧵 @EPWCmte Dems argued the case for EPW’s jurisdiction over White House construction and federal public buildings.

We argued that the Public Buildings Act requires EPW approval of projects exceeding $3.9 million. Which it does.

Top 10 reasons why Democrats need to talk about climate change now:

🧵 1.  In some states, the top economic issue is the home insurance meltdown. Start with a big cost, add a huge increase, and you get big cost impact on families.

The gentleman who ICE hauled without cause out of his home in his underwear into the icy Minnesota winter (after terrifying his 5-year-old grandson) was from Laos, one of the Hmong hill tribes people of the then-Kingdom of Laos.

🧵 You should know a bit about the background of those people.

During the Vietnam conflict, the CIA supported a Hmong military force operating out of a base in Laos called Long Tieng, run by a general named Vang Pao.

Yet again, actual data show wind and solar are the least expensive power on the grid (and getting cheaper by the day). So the Trump administration is just lying about that. Trumpsters lie in no-accountability public statements, but when the lie was challenged in offshore wind court filings that asserted huge cost savings for consumers, they conspicuously failed to contest that.

This is getting ugly fast.

🧵

https://twitter.com/SenWhitehouse/status/1990794164683092377

The saga began initially with Trump’s plan to illegally deport people from the United States to a foreign prison. When lawyers for the victims of that scheme got wind of it, they went to court.

Many feel betrayal and frustration, and the feelings are hot right now.

I get it. I have my own feelings.

🧵 But there are real dangers out there that must be fought; and energy spent fighting each other is energy lost to that bigger fight.

I voted no tonight.

But the next phase of Democrats’ health care affordability fight is starting.

While I personally don’t believe Republicans will keep their promise to work with us on lowering health care costs, I would be thrilled to be wrong. The American people are with us, and Republicans will pay a heavy political price if they do not follow through on their commitment to work in a bipartisan way to lower skyrocketing premiums.

The latest shadow docket decision moves the Supreme Court further down a submissive pattern of wins given up to Trump: the pattern is 10:1. 🧵 Courts allow bias to be assessed using evidence of pattern, so what’s good for the goose should be good for gander, and pattern evidence should be fair game.