Jane LaBate

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The Southern District of New York is the office that prosecuted Trump on 34 felony counts. He is still appealing those convictions.

The lawyer he just named to run that office - James M. McDonald - is on the legal team handling that appeal.
McDonald is a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. He is part of the team that last month secured the Justice Department's decision to drop a fraud and conspiracy case against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani - a case brought under the Biden administration and killed under this one.

SDNY has jurisdiction over terrorism, espionage, securities fraud, and public corruption. It is arguably the most consequential prosecutor's office in the country. Trump is now placing his personal defense attorney in charge of it.

Jay Clayton, who previously held the SDNY job, is being moved to director of national intelligence - a role that opened when Tulsi Gabbard resigned and that Trump briefly tried to fill with Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, before congressional pressure forced a different choice.

The chain here is not complicated. The office that convicted him gets his lawyer. The intelligence community gets the man who ran the housing finance regulator. A personal attorney now controls a portfolio that includes public corruption cases.

This is what the completion of the project looks like.

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: The Trump administration took its most aggressive steps to dismantle the Education Department by breaking away key programs for disabled students and the enforcement of civil rights laws in schools. https://t.co/tj3dQbmHIC

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: The Justice Dept. is seeking to throw out a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s company, xAI, over the data center's air pollution, saying it has the right to run polluting gas-burning turbines in Mississippi despite not having permits for them. https://t.co/CxztBM0baD

[FactPost @factpostnews]

Markwayne Mullin had the FDA delete warnings about the dangers of kratom, an addictive and sometimes lethal drug found in gas stations.

Mullin holds an up to $1 million stake in a major kratom company.

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

Fifty years of rules keeping off-road vehicles on designated trails — GONE.

Lifted trucks, ATVs, dirt bikes, snowmobiles.

Anywhere they want. On your public lands.

Nixon protected it. Carter protected it. Trump just erased both quietly on a Friday afternoon.

A grizzly bear will abandon its habitat when there's just one mile of road per square mile. One mile. Now there's no limit on where these vehicles can go.

In the Mojave, desert tortoises have already lost 96% of their population in some monitored areas - partly because off-road vehicles crush their burrows. A federal judge just ordered 2,200 miles of trails closed to protect what's left.

Then Trump signed this.

No designated trails. No boundaries. No framework at all. When vehicles go off trail they shatter habitat into pieces too small for wildlife to survive in. They destroy stream banks. They push predators toward humans. And when that happens, the animals always lose.

There was no vote. No public comment. Just a signature.

Now the agencies tasked with writing replacement rules are the BLM, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service - all under an administration that has spent months dismantling every protection they had.

The Interior Department, led by Doug Burgum, is in charge of most of it. The same Doug Burgum who has opened public lands to drilling, mining, and grazing at every turn.

Don't hold your breath.

When the last quiet place is gone, what do we tell the children who never got to hear it?

#DemsUnited

[House Judiciary Dems @HouseJudiciary]

Judiciary Democrats have uncovered that FBI Director Kash Patel directed over $1 MILLION in unlawful taxpayer-funded bonuses to a small group of MAGA agents and members of Patel’s personal security detail.

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Trump is giving $300 billion to Iran. This could pay for:

— Student debt elimination for 7.6M Americans
— An end to homelessness in America
— Healthcare subsidies for 22M Americans for nearly a decade
— Medicaid coverage for 3.2M Americans for a decade
— Food assistance for 41M Americans for 3 years
— Federal cancer research for 40+ years
— Free school lunch for every kid in America for over 4 years
— Replacing every lead pipe in America
— Free pre-K for every child in America for over 7 years

[FactPost @factpostnews]

The Trump administration will use around $300 million in taxpayer funds to pay for ballroom construction, per internal documents

[Reuters @Reuters]

The Trumps have not only enriched themselves to an unprecedented extent for a sitting US president and his family, but have done so through crypto deals that carried little to no downside risk for them while resulting in big losses for retail investors https://t.co/Q3KBrvUO1W

[Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew]

President Trump recently pardoned Stephen Buyer, a former member of Congress convicted of insider trading. For those keeping track at home, this makes *22* politicians convicted of corruption charges granted clemency by President Trump.
https://t.co/theuAGyyc8

[Brian Tyler Cohen @briantylercohen]

The 10 hours of erecting scaffolding wasn’t to strip the letters (something that 30 minutes in a boom lift could accomplish), it was to conceal the view with a curtain because Trump couldn’t handle the optics of the letters of his name being plucked off the building.

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

ICE tackle U.S. citizen—shoot him with taser after already pinned to ground.

4 agents hold the man face down—while 5th agent tazed him in the back.

Another agent points a weapon at a witness.

"Don't point that at me again," man says.

"I don't feel safe," agent yells back. "It's whatever I say—Get back!"

The man detained was a community volunteer with VC Defensa.

Incident occurred in an area open to the public at the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, California.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Elias: Why does California have signature matching? They have it to satisfy the same right-wing zealots who claim there’s fraud, right?

So they do this whole kabuki theater that takes all of this time in order to contend with the fact that people say that if you don’t do signature matching, there’s going to be fraud. And then they get attacked for taking the time to do that very thing.

The fact that the New York Times thinks there’s a middle ground here… Here’s my message: I don’t compromise with Republicans because there is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist, and they are trying to burn down democracy.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

BREAKING: ABC News Just Published Some Pretty Stunning ICE Data.

The administration says it is targeting the "worst of the worst."

But according to ABC's analysis of government data, only 3% of the more than 400,000 people detained by ICE between January 2025 and March 2026 had a violent felony conviction in the United States.

ABC reports that ICE apprehended more than 4,800 U.S. citizens and deported over 2,000 of them during the first eight months of 2025.

[John Jackson @hissgoescobra]

I want to give you guys some facts about General Chappie James. He wasn’t a “DEI” hire—he was a complete badass that had to overcome MORE than any white pilot. Did 178 combat missions—that’s like 7 bomber tours on a B-17 in WWII.

His medal count? Impeccable. 3 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 14 Air Medals, Two Legions of Merit, and a Defense Distinguished Service Medal. One of the original Tuskegee Airmen, the first four-star African American General.

Hegseth couldn’t sniff the level of soldiering and warrior that was in Chappie’s DNA. God bless him. And Hegseth took down his picture from a hallway like a racist little child, which is what he is.

[VoteVets @votevets]

BREAKING: In a shocking maneuver, Senate Republicans just BLOCKED a Democratic effort to BAN federal troops from entering polling stations or seizing ballots or voting machines. Makes you wonder what they’re planning this November…

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

The ICE flight taking Iranian women and others from safety in this country to high danger in the Central African Republic just left the ground.

People on this flight proved to a judge that they were likely to be persecuted in their home countries. This is profoundly unjust.

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Today, Elon Musk, a trillionaire, pays the same amount into Social Security as someone making $184,500.

If we end that absurdity and lift the cap on taxable income, we can make Social Security solvent for 75 years and expand benefits by $2,400. My Social Security bill does that.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Taxpayers paid for over $38 billion in subsidies and government contracts for Space X, and Elon Musk gets to be a trillionaire off of our tax dollars.
https://t.co/uI5Yy5ervR

[Democracy Docket @DemocracyDocket]

UPDATE: USPS just opposed a pro-voting request to enforce the protection of your mail-in ballot.

In 2021, USPS agreed to safeguard mail-in voting.

Now, per Trump's executive order, it's proposing rules that would let it refuse to deliver certain ballots, potentially violating that very agreement. https://t.co/MGUnoWjpz2