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According to President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, you may be a member of a criminal conspiracy if you have done any of the following: worn black to a demonstration, given face masks to protesters, joined a book club, distributed a zine. Recently, federal prosecutors have cited these actions as evidence that activists protesting Trump’s deportation […]

“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney famously said in 2011 while running for president. The Supreme Court decided the previous year that corporations could give money to political campaigns, just like people, and in 2014, the high court gave corporations religious freedom to deny contraceptives to employees, thereby letting them behave just as badly as people. If you prick corporations, do they not bleed? Actually no, they don’t. But as of now, they can get presidential pardons. The notion that corporations are people did not originate with the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010. Way back in 1886, the high court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad that corporations were covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. To be more precise, this question was addressed not in the decision (which resolved a local taxation dispute) but rather in a headnote that said the court “does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations because “we are all of the opinion that it does.“ Somehow this non sequitur became legal precedent. “Later cases,” wrote Stetson University law professor Clara Torres-Spelliscy in a 2014 analysis for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, “uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.”Santa Clara was used, for example, to justify the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a sort of Citizens United precursor in which corporations were granted the right to spend unlimited funds on ballot initiatives. The dissenter in that case, weirdly, was the future conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Rehnquist wasn’t ordinarily a guy to lose sleep over excessive corporate power. But in this instance he worried the majority opinion would expand political rights for labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP. Rehnquist wrote:A State grants to a business corporation the blessings of potentially perpetual life and limited liability to enhance its efficiency as an economic entity. It might reasonably be concluded that those properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose special dangers in the political sphere…. [T]he States might reasonably fear that the corporation would use its economic power to obtain further benefits beyond those already bestowed. In any event, Rehnquist’s fears were borne out—not by labor unions or liberal nonprofits, but by American businesses.One reason the Supreme Court justices in Santa Clara County took it on faith that corporations were people may have been that judges and regulators were starting to regard corporations as potential criminals under the legal doctrine of respondeat superior (“let the master answer”). The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 leveled criminal penalties against corporations, and so did the Elkins Act of 1903, which added criminal penalties to the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act. (This is your periodic reminder that the federal administrative state was created not by Woodrow Wilson, as the Roberts court would have you believe, but by railroads behaving badly.) In 1909, the Supreme Court upheld the notion that corporations were people for the purposes of criminal prosecution in New York Central & Hudson River Railroad v. United States. Since you can’t throw a corporation in jail, it’s fair to ask what the point was in subjecting corporations to criminal prosecution. In civil trials, judges can levy fines and order corporations to change their behavior, just as they can in criminal cases. But in the early twentieth century, civil law wasn’t sufficient because little civil liability then existed for corporations; most legal bases for suing corporations were established during the New Deal and after. The practical reason criminal prosecutions persist is that it remains easier, at least in certain cases, to bring misbehaving corporations to justice through criminal law. Also, criminal prosecutions inflict greater reputational damage on corporate scofflaws. Starting in 2000, though—the same year, ironically, that the Justice Department put out a memo to encourage criminal prosecution of corporations—such prosecutions began a steep decline at the federal level, dropping from 304 to 99 by 2022, according to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Public Citizen. That might not be so bad if federal civil litigation took up the slack, but it didn’t. Lawsuits filed by the federal government declined during the same period. The falloff in prosecuting corporations is, of course, accelerating right now under President Donald Trump.You know what isn’t declining? Pardons for corporations. Trump has granted nine. These were never a thing before Trump—not in the modern era, and possibly never. According to Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison, the nine pardons wiped out $200 million in financial penalties, “some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing.” Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, told Bloomberg: “In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole. Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”Half of the $200 million in wiped-out fines can be attributed to a single crypto company, BitMEX. The three co-founders of the company, a pioneer in crypto derivatives, all pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires maintaining certain safeguards against money laundering. Each paid $10 million in fines. Then, in July 2024, BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same crime, and this past January the company was fined $100 million. Something else of interest happened in January. BitMEX created a swap listing tied to the $TRUMP memecoin. Two months later, Trump pardoned the co-founders and the company. The pardon didn’t appear in time to spare the co-founders from paying $30 million, but it was just in time for BitMEX itself to avoid paying the $100 million fine, since the deadline was later that week. Before Trump, pardons and commutations did not spare recipients from having to fork over unpaid penalties. (Once a fine is paid, it’s non-recoverable unless Congress appropriates the money.)I think probably the fight against corporate personhood is lost. Rather than grieve, fellow liberals, let’s demand corporations be taxed as people. The top marginal tax rate for Homo sapiens is 37 percent. The flat corporate tax rate is 21 percent. To properly respect corporations’ innate dignity as human beings, let’s tax both up to 37 percent (and then raise the top rate for both to 70 percent, as it was before Ronald Reagan). Capital gains are kind of corporate too, aren’t they? The top capital gains rate is 20 percent. Raise that to 37 percent as well, and later to 70 percent. To do otherwise would treat you and me differently from corporations, and since 1886, that has violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection under the law. People are corporations, my friend.

Not long after a federal agent killed a Colombian immigrant in Maine last week, Senator Susan Collins rushed to declare that she’d privately talked to Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Collins credited herself for getting Mullin to end the vehicle stops by agents that have spawned many killings on the streets of U.S. cities, including the deaths of American citizens.Only hours later, Trump abruptly reversed Mullin’s decision, decreeing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s reviled tactics will continue. “We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump raged. The stops resumed, undercutting Collins’s effort to project deep concern about the killing.The incident neatly captures how Trump, through his handling of this horrific ICE shooting, is inadvertently screwing over Collins and complicating her path to reelection. The shooting is a real problem for Collins: It highlights her votes to fund Trump’s rampaging paramilitary forces and her feckless refusal to rein in his worst abuses of power. It localizes a national issue and could viscerally mobilize Maine voters against her. And it allows Democrats to try to seize the offensive on turf that has historically favored Republicans.“Susan Collins is directly responsible for handing ICE a blank check,” Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, told me. “This is front and center now in our communities. And we are going to hold her accountable in November.”Can Democrats turn the ICE shooting into a serious liability for Collins and shift the broader moral debate over immigration their way? It should be very doable. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was gunned down after agents boxed in his vehicle outside his home in Biddeford, and his three-year-old daughter was seen crying after the incident. He has been widely described as a devoted father and hard worker who was in this country legally.Nor was Durán Guerrero the intended target of the enforcement operation to begin with. And the agent who pulled the trigger, David Brouillette, has been described by relatives as mentally ill, violent, dangerous, and a domestic abuser. This horror raises profoundly grave questions about how ICE is recruiting, now that Trump and Stephen Miller are staffing up their deportation army at breakneck speed and unshackling it to carry out violent ethnic purges on a mass scale. It’s here that Collins deserves severe censure and should be politically vulnerable.Democrats, for instance, plan to make an issue out of a little-noticed vote by Collins not long before the shooting. In early June, Collins opposed an amendment, offered by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, that would have required ICE agents to wear active body cameras on duty and made footage available to Congress. The amendment was defeated on party lines amid passage of $70 billion in new ICE funding, which Collins voted for even though it utterly lacked guardrails against future abuses.These votes could now create bigger problems for Collins. As it turns out, the ICE agents involved in the killing of Durán Guerrero were not wearing body cameras. Collins is now insisting that she secured certain protections against ICE this year, such as $20 million for expanded bodycam use and other minor safeguards. But if ICE’s latest shootings confirm anything—agents also recently killed a 52-year-old immigrant father in Texas—it’s that such half measures are entirely useless in holding back the monster that Trump and Miller have unleashed.Collins’s reelection depends in part on perceptions of her willingness to take on Trump, including on immigration. But her approach has accomplished nothing. ICE agents have dragged their feet in using bodycams despite money being appropriated for it, and Trump’s ICE forces have shot around two dozen people, killing six. If anything, ICE has now been supercharged by the $70 billion Collins voted for. Her little safeguards will prove as constraining as an old picket fence in the face of a megaflood.So Democrats can argue that only lawmakers who are prepared to fully deploy congressional power to grind ICE’s killing machine to a halt deserve office. “Collins is accountable for getting us here,” Murphy-Anderson of the Maine Democratic Party told me. “She has stood with Trump and ICE at every single juncture.”Obviously it will still be very hard to defeat Collins. The race is super-close: A new poll finds Collins’s almost-certain challenger, Troy Jackson, leading her by 49 percent to 46 percent, a statistical tie. She’s a resilient politician with deep ties to her state. Some pundits still argue that ICE matters to the Democratic base far more than to swing voters—and that Democrats must tread carefully on the issue. It’s at least possible this will prove correct.But there’s reason to doubt this in Maine. A recent New York Times poll found that only 42 percent of Maine likely voters approve of Trump on immigration, while 56 percent disapprove. Among independents, those numbers are a stunning 39–61. So vowing to rein in ICE may well appeal to many in the middle. What’s more, highly engaged voters will likely dominate in the midterms, and the outcome will partly turn on which side is more energized. Democrats in the state say the ICE killing has ratcheted up the energy big-time among both Democratic voters and older women, who play an outsize role in Maine elections. As Murphy-Anderson put it, this is “viscerally” playing “across broad segments of our electorate.”Then there’s how Jackson, the Democratic challenger, will handle the issue. A former social conservative who has adopted progressive populist views over the years, he declared of the ICE killing: “This rogue agency must be abolished.” It does remain to be seen how that will play among moderate voters. But it’s a key tell that Collins is at least trying to appear concerned about voter anger at ICE: The energy is plainly on the anti-ICE side. What will probably matter most is which candidate speaks to voters’ revulsion over these killings with more force and emotion, and which can offer a clear path out of this madness while promising to restore the rule of law. Collins can’t do this persuasively. Jackson can.Ultimately, Collins’s biggest problem on this front may be the true nature of the Trump-Miller project. Ask yourself this: Why did Trump suddenly restart the vehicle stops that Collins had just boasted of stopping? The answer is obvious. Trump and Miller want immigrants and their allies to receive their message loud and clear: They have no real intention of dialing ICE down even when—especially when—it results in horrific killings like this one. ICE recruitment relies heavily on explicit white nationalist messaging that is quite openly enraptured with purging and purifying the nation via unchecked paramilitary aggression. Trump and Miller want all this to be fully understood by Americans as exactly what it is: a violent ethnic cleansing project that you should perpetually fear and loathe as an inevitable fact of life under the brutality of Trumpian rule.Collins is proceeding as if Trump is capable of acting conventionally—as if he’ll willingly moderate to help vulnerable Republicans in bluer areas, or treat mass removals as a mere law enforcement operation that’s subject, as is typical, to reform when it results in violent, terrifying excess. But the violence and the terror are the point. Broadcasting that ugly fact far and wide matters a whole lot more to Trump than Collins’s political survival does. And in the end, there’s always this: She just voted to fund a whole lot more of it.

"They're able to displace 2 million Palestinians from Gaza during the war, but they can't remove 20 settlers."

The BBC has hit President Trump with his third whammy in 24 hours—with the broadcast news organization this time renewing its demand for the release of records showing how Trump lost his “executive privilege” claims during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into January 6.The BBC noted in a reply memorandum Wednesday that it has already sent multiple “requests to government agencies seeking to obtain the same evidence the Special Counsel gathered and described as ‘evidence establish[ing] that the violence [on January 6] was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, that it was beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification, and that when it occurred, he made a conscious choice not to stop it and instead to leverage it for more delay.” But the Trump administration rejected those requests, claiming executive privilege. The BBC demanded more information on how Trump lost those same claims during Smith’s probe.“The government errs in characterizing the Executive Privilege Decisions as ‘information that might be incrementally helpful in litigating a potential future discovery dispute.’ Instead, unsealed decisions will likely be crucial to obtaining information that could be dispositive of President Trump’s lawsuit, as the BBC expects them to show that President Trump’s assertions of executive privilege have already been rejected,” the BBC wrote. “The Court should therefore further unseal the Executive Privilege Decisions and prevent the injustice that would arise from President Trump using already-rejected privilege claims to withhold such vital information.”This all stems from a $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed last year against the BBC over a 2024 episode of Panorama that he claimed was defamatory because it spliced together sections of his January 6, 2021, speech, highlighting his call for supporters to “fight like hell,” while omitting his request for peaceful protest. If the BBC can prove that Trump was aware of the violence he was fomenting, his whole defamation case falls apart.On Tuesday, a judge allowed the BBC to move forward with subpoenas against Trump’s closest advisers and confidants—like family members, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon—to better determine what Trump’s actual goals were on January 6. The judge also ordered Trump to hand over his financial records, opening yet another lane of exposure against the president.  

The Presidential 1776 Award competition was set up by the Trump administration to honor America’s 250th birthday with a civics contest for high school students. But the family of 15-year-old Aangad Singh believes he may have been kept out of the competition’s final because of his Sikh background and visible turban, NOTUS reports. Singh, a rising high school junior who lives in Connecticut, entered the competition in February just like other high school students around the country. He scored well enough to reach the finals in Washington, D.C., at the end of June and make the final eight. But his elimination after that left his family—and many of his competitors—puzzled.The Singh family didn’t think Aangad had performed poorly, but there wasn’t a live scoreboard. Other contestants told them after the competition that they were sure Aangad had won and were shocked that he wasn’t in the top three. When Aangad’s mother, Ramandeep, asked an official with the Department of Education, which helped run the contest, for the final scores, the official told her that was proprietary information. So the Singh family waited until the competition was televised on CBS three weeks later, and Aangad was shocked to learn some of his correct answers were labeled wrong. In one instance, Aangad was asked to give four examples where federal courts have jurisdiction, as outlined in Article 3 of the Constitution.Two of his answers—“Parties of state and citizens of another state,” and “Case with state and foreign nation”—were marked wrong. He showed his father a copy of the Constitution proving that his answers were right.In another instance, during a lightning round, Aangad was asked, “Which amendment ended slavery?” and his answer was marked wrong. Initially, he thought his pronunciation of “Thirteenth” was bad and that his th sounded like an f. But he was reassured when the TV subtitles proved that he said the correct answer. After the round ended, each contestant was interviewed by host Mario Lopez before he announced the three finalists, and Aangad gave an answer about being proud to share his knowledge about the country’s founding principles. Then he watched white contestants from Michigan, Washington, and Wyoming announced as the winners.Singh’s family thought that he was robbed, and weighed taking action. To his mother and uncle, it seemed like Aangad was being kept out of the spotlight—and a visit to the Oval Office to meet President Trump—because he was a brown kid with a turban. They didn’t care as much about getting a share of the $250,000 in scholarship money as much as Aangad being recognized for his hard work. The Wyoming winner was a homeschooled girl who would later be touted by the Department of Education for culture-war propaganda, and the Washington state winner told Trump at the White House that she wanted to attend Hillsdale College, a politically conservative school, to which Trump said he could give a recommendation.Aangad’s father, Bhalindar, reached out to the Department of Education twice by email, but has yet to get a response. The department told NOTUS that the questions in the competition were “developed, judged, and scored independently by the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation.” NOTUS sent the foundation a detailed list of questions, but also hasn’t heard back.Minutes before NOTUS’s deadline, the Department of Education responded, saying that the competition’s rules stated that judges would “exercise independent good faith judgement [sic]” in selecting finalists and winners, and that, by participating, contestants “agree that the decision of the judges is final and binding.”

Daniel Siad, the French modeling agent who allegedly introduced dozens of young women and girls to sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead in his Paris home on Monday. He was 69. Siad was one of many friends and associates that Epstein had in France, and was under investigation in the country for rape and human trafficking. Siad is mentioned in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice more than 2,000 times. Some of the most disturbing conversations between him and Epstein, occurring over a decade, involve him sending pictures and descriptions of young women to the convicted sex offender. “Hello Jeffrey I just found an amizinng One she is 20 years old but she looks younger from Latvia 5’8 She just Did a world campaign For Nivea Last weeck and she will be Doing an other campaign for Garnnier this week willing to sign with me as a personal agent. I am traveling with here to Paris this week let me know if you think it will be good to take here To Next and also what Agency you thing is apropriate for here in The US she said that she meet Jean luck once in Danemark wile she was there with Scoop Models . because a girl like this is future star we need to make here a good contract world wide” Siad wrote in one email in 2009, referring to another modeling agent, Epstein friend, and alleged sex trafficker, Jean-Luc Brunel—who died by suicide in his jail cell in 2022.“The Russian girl as canceled her fly . I wanted to make for you a great surprise ,it didn’t work this time ,I really hope that it work next time . In This busyness I feel like fisherman some time I cache quick , some time no fish,” he wrote in another 2015 email to Epstein. “I really did good work for scouting in Scandinavia most of them will be ready to start with 2morrow at list 5 of them sixteen and seventeen will be ready for next year .But I can’t send you there pictures as know.”“The French her name is [REDACTED] she is fifteen her parents checked me out and they are very happy there daughter to start modelin,” he continued. “I am going back to Stockholm then Gotland for what we call Stockholm week all the girls from sweden gather there for five days non stop Parties .to through my hooks.”  These emails sound like Epstein commissioned Siad to go around and find women and girls to funnel to him for over a decade. Siad has denied all allegations against him, telling CNN just last month that he had no idea Epstein was abusing the girls he sent his way. “I never doubt that because I never heard anything from anyone who I introduced [to Epstein] who came back to me that they had a bad—a bad situation with him,” Siad said. “He was such a powerful person. And how can I not trust him?”Siad was originally from Algeria and moved to Sweden in the 1980s before settling in Paris, where he likely met Epstein through Brunel, although it’s unclear when. Epstein spent a lot of time in Paris, particularly after his first conviction. Conductor Frédéric Chaslin and diplomat Fabrice Aidan are two of the other most prominent Frenchmen mentioned in the files along with Siad and Brunel. 

From the moment of its announcement, the so-called settlement agreement between the Justice Department and Donald Trump has provoked fierce opposition. Little wonder: The deal purports to be an arms-length exchange in which Trump gets a $1.776 billion fund to shower on January 6 offenders and other friends, plus a release from tax audits worth $100 million or more, while all the public gets is a release from a worthless, unconstitutional lawsuit. That is $2 billion or so in return for jack, with the added insult of funding insurrectionists who assaulted police officers and letting Trump walk away from who knows what tax schemes.Defending the deal to an angry Congress during his confirmation hearings last week, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche adopted a two-part mantra. The slush fund would not go forward, though he has perversely refused to formalize that and has been prickly toward anyone who insists he should. The tax amnesty, meanwhile, remains, legitimized as consideration for Trump’s dismissal of his suit against the IRS. Unfortunately for Blanche, both legs of his defense were sawed out from under him last Wednesday at his hearing. The unraveling of Blanche’s position on the fund came under questioning from Texas GOP Senator John Cornyn. Cornyn stood at the witness table with an enlarged copy of the settlement and walked Blanche through its own language: The terms “may be modified only upon the written agreement of the parties.” Had there been any such written agreement? No, Blanche conceded. Then Cornyn asked the pivotal question: Is the settlement an enforceable contract? Blanche’s answer: “Yes, it’s an enforceable document.” Trump’s side, he allowed, “could try to enforce the contract” and “could potentially say that we breached by not moving forward.”That is the whole ball game. If the agreement is enforceable, it is enforceable by its beneficiary: Donald Trump. He and his companies have already done their part, dismissing the (worthless) lawsuit, which obligates DOJ to come through with its promises of the slush fund and tax amnesty. So Blanche did two remarkable things at once. First, he handed Trump an enforceable right to $2 billion in public money in return for nothing. And second, by insisting his own say-so can terminate the fund, he confirmed the deal is collusive. In a real dispute between real adversaries, DOJ’s assurances about termination would be meaningless, even absurd, because the beneficiary could simply enforce the contract. Blanche’s word carries weight only because Trump and his Justice Department were never on opposite sides of the “v.” here to begin with.Blanche’s testimony also reanimates the tax amnesty; and here the trouble is not that his defense collapses but that it proves too much. Pressed by Democratic Senators Dick Durbin and Adam Schiff on the order shielding Trump, his sons, and his companies from IRS audits, Blanche rested his entire defense on the settlement, calling the audit release “typical” and anchoring the immunity to “that settlement” at every turn.But set his two answers side by side. On the amnesty, the agreement is valid, binding, enforceable—a live instrument DOJ means to honor. On the fund, the same agreement is a dead letter the department can simply decline to perform. The provisions sit in one document, rise on the same consideration, stand or fall on the same enforceability. What legal principle keeps one alive and lets the other lapse? There is none: No doctrine of contract carves a single agreement in half this way.What Blanche offered the committee was not a legal position at all. It was doggerel: a contract that binds when he wants immunity and evaporates when he wants to bury the fund, a settlement at once ironclad and a dead letter. It has the meter of law but none of its logic. You cannot pocket Trump’s consideration, enforce the amnesty, and bury the fund.According to Blanche’s account, what survives is decided not by law but by the caprice of the attorney general, good only until it meets the caprice of the boss who wants it otherwise.There is a graver point still, one the committee let pass: Two federal courts have already ruled against him. Judge Leonie Brinkema, in the Eastern District of Virginia, held that the challenge to the fund is not moot; and it does not matter what Blanche tells Congress, because mootness is a legal question for a court, not the biased acting attorney general, to determine. Judge Kathleen M. Williams, in the Southern District of Florida, went further, finding no genuine settlement at all—only a bogus, collusive suit filed for an “improper purpose” that no federal court has power to hear. Yet Blanche ignored these binding rulings, which DOJ has not challenged. In fact, he had the temerity to tell senators he’d studied the Eleventh Circuit and disagreed with Williams. It’s the same contempt for the courts that was on display in March 2025, when Blanche and Emil Bove pressed removals to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador in the teeth of a court order. An attorney general nominee who believes he can pick and choose which legal judgments bind the government is, on that ground alone, disqualified from running the Justice Department. Blanche made a slip during his testimony of which much has been made. Asked whether he and Trump were friends, Blanche answered, “I’m his lawyer,” before catching himself: “was his lawyer, and now I’m the deputy attorney general.” The correction came a beat too late. It’s not a “gotcha” low blow, but a fair highlight. Everything in last Wednesday’s testimony points to a man who still understands the job exactly as he blurted it out: He is Trump’s lawyer.Senators, take note. The slush fund and the tax amnesty are both very much in play. Right now, you have leverage: the same leverage that forced Blanche to meet, however cursorily, with victims of Epstein’s crimes after Republican North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis signaled his vote turned on it. If Blanche is confirmed, that leverage is gone.More, you have clear evidence that this nominee conspired to create a bogus, illegal deal to enrich the boss and impoverish the public, then, to put it gently, misled you about it. A vote to confirm is a vote to ratify not simply these putrid thefts for Trump’s benefit but also the politicization of the Justice Department, the subordination of the courts to the man who runs it, and a single-minded devotion to the one person Blanche aptly, if inadvertently, identified as his client. He has more than earned your “no” vote.