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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 11 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump’s latest claims about the Iran war are lurching wildly in different directions. He just claimed that he loves the inflation it’s creating for reasons that remain impenetrable. He also insisted that he’s about to attack Iran again as retaliation for them shooting down a U.S. helicopter while simultaneously claiming Iran has been totally defeated. It’s all gotten so absurd that his own advisors are struggling to defend his stances, as one extraordinary exchange in Congress with Energy Secretary Chris Wright reveals.The situation’s moving rapidly and Trump is dramatically confusing matters with his unchecked derangement. So we’re trying to pin down what’s really happening with Ariane Tabatabai, a former Defense Department official under Joe Biden who’s now at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Ari, nice to have you on.Ariane Tabatabai: Thanks for having me, Greg.Sargent: So let’s quickly summarize. Earlier this week, Trump was saying a deal with Iran was imminent within a day or two. Then a U.S. helicopter was shot down. Trump said Iran did it. He launched limited strikes to retaliate. He’s now also said Iran is taking too long and that it will pay the price. Then on Wednesday, he vowed to escalate hostilities again, saying, “We’re going to hit them hard again today.” By the time you all listen to this, he may well have attacked again—or not. Ari, can you recap where we are here?Tabatabai: That’s the perfect summary of where we are. We’ve had two parallel tracks that have been ongoing. One is on the diplomatic front, where the United States and Iran have been negotiating on how to sustainably end this conflict and kind of pave the way for further negotiations on other issues of interest, including Iran’s nuclear program, which is one of the main reasons why we’re in this conflict to begin with. We can come back to this.Then there’s a second track, the military track, where—we’ve had ebbs and flows in this conflict over the past week, as you described. The most recent thing that happened that seems to have led to this latest round of escalation is that the Iranians evidently shot down an Apache helicopter. After that happened, the president had this Truth Social post and said that he was going to be targeting Iran again. He did. There’s been reporting over the past 24 hours that we even may have struck some Iranian water supplies. I should pause here and let folks know—this is a country that has deeply struggled with water shortages and droughts, and they’re about to enter very, very hot months over there. So if that is actually the case—it seems like U.S. Central Command has neither said yes or no—that would be pretty troubling, in addition to some of the other things we’ve seen over the past few months in this conflict.But nonetheless, we’re in this new round of escalation that is not only leading to a tit for tat between the U.S. and Iran, but is also again spilling over into other places in the region, including Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain, all of which house U.S. forces on their soil.Sargent: Just to clarify for people, Trump is very clearly saying that he’s going to escalate now. And by the time people listen to this, that may have happened or it may not have happened.So it’s in this context that Trump told reporters that he loves inflation. The new inflation numbers just came out. They’re devastating for Trump. It’s over 4 percent now. He was asked about this, and he segued to saying that the U.S. has secretly been removing millions of barrels of oil from Iran. We’ll get to what that means in a second. But first, let’s listen to Trump.Donald Trump (voiceover): You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over—you know, I can say it now. Something you didn’t know. Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil? Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran—until right now.Sargent: Now, why Trump said the part about loving inflation is a little hard to understand, but with the secret removal of millions of barrels of oil, he seems to mean the U.S. is escorting ships carrying oil out of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran is keeping closed. Ari, can you shed any light on this?Tabatabai: It’s really hard, as you know, to make sense of what the president might be trying to say here. He does have a tendency to use verbs for other verbs. It’s really hard for me to say exactly what he meant. I think there’s a few different ways to read the statement. Yours seems like the right one to me, which is that what is in essence happening is that the U.S. Navy is conducting freedom-of-navigation operations, allowing for tankers to cross the Strait of Hormuz. Obviously Iran has been holding the Strait of Hormuz at risk for weeks now and preventing the oil flow from happening. I think this is the plausible explanation.There are a few questions to me here, though. One of the key questions is—we’re talking about this diplomatic track that seems to be slowly but surely maybe progressing. It’s clearly not going as fast as Trump would like. These things tend to take time. And again, we’re just a few months away from the midterms. But the surest way to reopen the strait would really be to get a deal, right? Otherwise we’re going to be spending a lot of money sending assets to the region that are just going to make sure that these tankers are able to move and to get the oil back on the market. That seems like a really interesting use of these very expensive assets. And that is not even counting the human lives that are at stake here. Thousands of people have died throughout the region since this war started. We’ve had U.S. service members who’ve been killed or injured in this. Of course, our bases and other infrastructure are being targeted throughout the region. So this is putting a Band-Aid on one of the many issues that is cascading out of this conflict. And it is not a sustainable Band-Aid. It is one that we can maybe continue for a bit, but ultimately there needs to be a more sustainable solution here.Sargent: Well, Trump on Truth Social just announced, in quotes, this secret operation to escort tankers and ships through the strait. He said this: “Today I am pleased to announce that this effort has resulted in more than a hundred million barrels of oil making its way through the strait and into the open market. This wildly successful effort is because the United States of America controls the Strait of Hormuz, not Iran.”So obviously Trump is absolutely desperate to make it look as if he’s in total control of the Strait of Hormuz and the situation more broadly. But what I’m having trouble understanding is what he means. He is saying with total—well, clarity’s obviously the wrong word—he is saying what he thinks he means to be that this is actually happening; that a hundred million barrels of oil has been transported out of Iran through the strait because the U.S. is escorting them and that oil has gone onto the open market. Does the U.S. control the Strait of Hormuz? How real is any of this?Tabatabai: It doesn’t. Sargent: Is the oil being transferred? Is it happening? Do we know?Tabatabai: I don’t know. And if it is happening, is it happening on the scale that he says it is? I don’t know. Again, this is somebody who talks about drug prices going down 600 percent. So if you’ve bought any Advil recently, you should really be getting some money back.I think some of this is hyperbole. He’s not known for being precise, to say the least. It might be that there is some oil that is making its way into the market. We’ll see that in the days to come, we’ll be able to fact-check that. I don’t have that information. The piece where he talks about the control of the Strait of Hormuz is clearly not real. If it were real, then we would not be in this situation to begin with.It’s part of this narrative that he has about this conflict where he keeps talking about Iran’s military being completely destroyed. Last year, after the summer operations against Iran’s nuclear program, he said that basically their entire nuclear program had been obliterated. And that was not the case, because we’re here again. And by the way, Iran still has several hundred kilograms of highly enriched uranium on its soil. That is very troubling. Iran still has military capabilities. It’s not 100 percent of what it had at the beginning of this conflict, but it’s not nothing, which is why they were able to shoot down an Apache just a couple of days ago.And the piece that is really something folks should understand is that we, the United States, are spending billions and billions of dollars sending very expensive, sophisticated weapon systems—munitions, missiles, platforms—to fight what was, even before this war, not a particularly sophisticated military. Iran’s military is not China’s military. It’s not even Russia’s military. They weren’t known for having large, expensive platforms.This was an unequal war. And even without those sophisticated capabilities, Iran has been able to really create this dilemma for the United States. And we’re here several months later, when the president had said that this would be a war that would be over pretty quickly. So all of this to say, this is just another one of these statements in this conflict that are probably not going to stand the test of time.Sargent: Probably not. We should note, by the way, that the headlines on the inflation spike are really tough for Trump. The Washington Post says this: “Inflation heats up to highest point in three years, fueled by Iran war.” New York Times: “Inflation jumps as Iran war intensifies price squeeze.” Politico: “Inflation surges to three-year high as Iran fighting drags on.”Ari, the reason I’m highlighting these is that they directly tie the worsening inflation to Trump’s war. Everybody understands that this is what’s happening. It’s a real rarity that presidential responsibility for the state of the economy is so clear. Your thoughts on all that?Tabatabai: Look, I’m not an economist, but I also have to go get gas every day—well, I don’t get it every day, but I have to get gas. I see the prices keep going up. And again, we’re really in the depths of the midterm season at this point. We’ve had primaries throughout the country. Folks are really feeling the hurt of this conflict in a way that other foreign policy decisions don’t necessarily make the results known as much for everyday people. People, when they go to get gas or purchase groceries, they can directly feel the impact of this war. That is not generally the case with foreign policy issues.So it’ll be really interesting to see, if this conflict continues, how it shapes people’s attitudes as we go into November. My organization, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, has been doing some polling on the attitudes of Americans about this conflict. It is not a popular conflict, as you can imagine. Republicans, of course, are more supportive than Democrats and independents, but it is by and large a pretty unpopular conflict. This is probably adding to Trump just wanting to get a deal done really quickly.This is something that many of us in the analytical community had said for years—once you start a conflict, you don’t always end it on your terms. You rarely end it exclusively on your terms, because the adversary gets a vote as well. And he’s discovering that in real time now.Sargent: You’d think he’s discovering it. He’s certainly acting as if he’s entirely won and then he lurches towards saying that retaliation’s necessary. It’s all very opaque.I want to get into how hard all this is to defend. Let’s listen to an exchange in Congress where Representative Emilia Sykes questions Energy Secretary Chris Wright.Emilia Sykes (voiceover): Do you feel like your positions and policy statements are in line with President Trump?Chris Wright (voiceover): Yes, I hope so.Sykes: Do you love inflation?Wright: I love ending Iran’s ability to have a nuclear weapon. I think that’s existential for us.Sykes: That was not my question. Do you love inflation, yes or no?Wright: I love ending Iran’s—Sykes: That is not my question. Do you love inflation, yes or no?Wright: No, I would prefer lower inflation.Sykes: You would prefer lower inflation. Do you know that your boss, essentially, President Trump, just stated that he loved inflation?Wright: He’s an entertaining, hyperbolic guy who’s done tremendous leadership.Sargent: Note how absolutely terrified Wright is of appearing to differ with Trump in any way at all. Now listen to this exchange about all that oil that Trump says the U.S. is transferring out. Sykes plays audio of Trump making that claim, and then this happens.Sykes (voiceover): So why would the United States be taking out millions of barrels of oil from Iran?Wright (voiceover): Well, it’s essential that we prevent oil sales from generating revenue for Iran to spend to develop nuclear weapons—Sykes: Mr. Secretary, I understand this might be an uncomfortable line of questioning and you don’t want to do it, but you are not answering my question. So I’m going to ask you again and I’m going to hope that you will answer it honestly. Did you know that the United States was taking millions of [barrels] of oil from Iran?Wright: I’m unaware.Sykes: So do you think that the president is lying based on the audio that you just heard? And I will send it to you in case you say you didn’t hear it.Wright: No, I do not think the president is lying. I think the president’s talking casually about our efforts to stop the flow of Iranian oil.Sargent: That is some mysterious stuff. As far as I can tell, parsing it—it’s really convoluted and crazy—but I think Energy Secretary Chris Wright admitted that Trump basically made the stuff up about the oil being transferred out and said he thinks what Trump really meant was that the blockade, the U.S. blockade, was keeping the oil from getting to the market. Can you make any sense of it?Tabatabai: I don’t know if I can. It does point to a much larger issue, which is again how we ended up where we are now, which is that this administration is really lacking in people who are both knowledgeable of issues and willing to stand up to the president or give him advice that he may not necessarily like. And that is such a fundamental part of what these Cabinet positions are supposed to be. They’re not supposed to be yes-men who just stand there and say, Yes, sir, you’re correct about everything you’re doing. They’re supposed to bring their best expertise of their agency or department they represent, and they’re supposed to help the president make a better set of decisions. And that has not happened, which is how—We’ve talked about the Strait of Hormuz. I can tell you that for years and years, folks who’ve worked on this Iran portfolio in different agencies and departments have known that this would be a possibility—in fact, that it was a very likely outcome of a conflict. It seems like that viewpoint was not represented, which is how we’ve now had multiple administration officials, including the president himself, say, No one knew that this would happen. No. Everyone who’s worked on this issue knew that this would happen. It is really troubling that he’s not hearing folks tell him things that he wouldn’t necessarily want to hear.Sargent: Just to pick up on the point you made there, here Chris Wright very visibly does not think of his job as telling the truth to the president or to the American people. He clearly understands his job as being sycophant to the president. It’s very clear.Tabatabai: It’s really telling that if—I keep thinking about this, having served in a Democratic administration—if this was the way that some of my former bosses had responded to folks on the Hill, Republicans on the Hill, the other party, I don’t think we would have heard the end of it. There would have been impeachment processes. Yet this is how the administration treats Congress—an atrophied Congress that has frankly not stood up to this administration, even as it’s made bad decision after bad decision on a host of issues, for things that we’re going to be really paying the price for for years to come.We’ve talked about the implications for people’s paychecks every day and their gas and groceries and so on. But there’s the longer-term cost of these conflicts that we’re not seeing quite yet. There’s the support from allies and partners and our international standing, which sounds like this interesting concept that only academics care about, but it is not. Our ability to have a good story to tell internationally is how we get a lot of things done that directly impact people every day. We’re going to be paying the price of these facilities that are being targeted, of these defense systems that we’ve spent billions and billions of dollars buying that are now being damaged and destroyed. We’re going to potentially see huge implications for recruitment and retention in the military. There’s so many things that are going to be happening in years to come that are directly stemming from the actions that the administration is taking. Congress should care more. It should be playing more of a role. And it is just not doing that right now.Sargent: Just to finish this out, what’s going to happen now? Granted, we don’t know whether by the time people are listening to this, Trump will have bombed Iran again. Maybe he will have completely obliterated it by tomorrow as he’s been threatening to do by the time people listen to this. Maybe not. But understanding that things are in, let’s say, flux, what is the most likely set of scenarios to unfold from here?Tabatabai: I think what we’re going to see is escalation, kind of a steady-state situation, and then we’ll keep moving forward that way. It’s clear to me that President Trump is ready to move on from this conflict. He has Cuba on his radar. He keeps saying the midterms don’t matter, but they clearly do. He’s just stuck here, because on the one hand, Iran again gets a vote. On the other hand, any deal with Iran will be problematic for him—will be extremely divisive within his own base. He obviously doesn’t care what Democrats or independents think, but he cares what Republicans think. Many Republicans will be very opposed to any deal with Iran.Then you have the additional challenge of—we’re degrading Iranian military capabilities, but this is not a country that needs a ton of sophisticated capabilities. They can keep doing this for a while. This is not a democracy that is going to have to respond to its people because gas is expensive. This is an authoritarian regime that is going to be able to continue this for as long as it needs to. Frankly, it probably benefits from it, because it has cover to crack down on dissent, for example, and to continue to have an external enemy to point to.For Iran, winning is not about winning militarily. It’s about standing up and not losing to the United States. And that is a really bad recipe here for a situation that continues in a way that is problematic for all of the people of that region who have to live with the missile attacks and drone attacks and unpredictability, frankly.Sargent: It’s going to get a whole lot worse for Americans and even worse for people over there, unfortunately. Ariane Tabatabai, it was really good to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.Tabatabai: Thanks so much for having me.

In U.S. politics, it’s slobs versus snobs.

We learned this week that the Democratic-aligned group American Bridge plans to spend $50 million to help the party’s congressional candidates in this fall’s elections. It’s a whopping sum and a big gamble. The group’s announcement of its targeted seats turned heads in Democratic circles: They include House districts in some pretty pro-Trump areas in rural North Carolina, central Pennsylvania, and Iowa farm country. All of which raises a question: Are these really plausible pickup opportunities for Democrats? The selection of these seats, it turns out, is backed up by some detailed internal polling and research. The findings shed light on the party’s perennial debate about how to win back various working-class and Trump-curious constituencies—and offer reasons for cautious optimism.The research into these places—which was conducted by the Democratic firm BlueLabs for American Bridge and described to The New Republic—tells a somewhat complicated story. To start with, the most eye-opening finding is that a lot of voters in these red places blame Trump and the GOP for their economic woes.To gauge this, American Bridge modeled a target universe of voters in these regions, using survey research, vote history, and other techniques. This voter universe includes people souring on Trump (they voted for him but now disapprove), people deemed highly persuadable (not rigid partisans), and people who describe themselves as in some sense economically vulnerable.The pollsters then asked these pools of voters if they see the economy worsening and who they blame for it. The answers they got back from four states are striking:In Iowa, 58 percent of these targeted voters see the economy worsening and blame Trump for it, and 56 percent blame the GOP.In Michigan, 63 percent of these voters blame Trump, and 61 percent blame the GOP.In North Carolina, 51 percent of these voters blame Trump, and 48 percent blame the GOP.In Pennsylvania, 54 percent of these voters blame Trump, while 57 percent blame the GOP.Drilling down further, the findings are very similar among that pool of voter groups within the specific House districts (all of which Trump won in 2024) that American Bridge is targeting in these states. Among them: two in Iowa (the 1st and 2nd), two in Michigan (the 4th and 10th), one in Ohio (the 7th), one in Pennsylvania (the 8th), and four in North Carolina (the 3rd, 5th, 9th, and 11th). So what do these voters want? Well, among the targeted constituencies in these districts, the testing found, a certain type of economic messaging resonates. It blames insurance companies and other conglomerates for high medical and prescription drug costs and hits big corporations for price gouging and tax avoidance. It blames Trump and Republicans for allowing these things to happen. And finally, that messaging vows that Democrats will crack down on them. Similarly, regions hit hard by Trump’s tariffs and Iran-war-related costs are very responsive to arguments about those things. Among targeted voters in Iowa’s 1st and 2nd districts, for instance, one message that resonates hits Republicans for backing Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran, arguing that they’ve hiked grocery and energy costs and hurt farmers who export goods. In short, what appears to work is a populist economics that centers villains, hits Trump and Republicans for enabling them, and pledges action.All this is backed up by public polling. The latest Economist/YouGov poll has Trump’s approval on the economy and inflation in the twenties. And a new analysis from The Argument finds Trump’s net approval deeply underwater in many red states (minus eight in Iowa and Ohio; minus 18 in purplish North Carolina) with competitive Senate races in them. As Paul Krugman documents, the real conditions of the rural economy are so bad that even rural voters disapprove of Trump’s stewardship of it.Our debates over Democrats and the working class have gotten somewhat scrambled by Graham Platner’s Senate run in Maine. (Despite deeply troubling revelations about his Nazi-like tattoo and alleged violence toward women, he easily won the nomination Tuesday and Democrats appear committed to him.) Platner works as an oyster farmer, served in combat, prominently displays those tattooed arms, and speaks an effective language of left populism that’s rooted in his personal struggles to get by. Yet Platner’s somewhat more privileged backstory (his father is an Ivy League grad and lawyer), while not detracting from his pro-worker bona fides, also highlights a phenomenon that’s explained well by Noam Scheiber. The “working class” is a complicated entity these days. It can’t be simplified into “those without a four-year college degree,” though for polling purposes it’s useful and the educational divide does remain significant in determining social outcomes.Nor does the “working class” map neatly onto the mid–twentieth century picture of the predominantly white, heavily male industrial working class that—bafflingly—remains a touchstone in our political debates. The working classes—for the purposes of our politics—span all kinds of people. They arguably include everyone from conventional “hard hat” and manufacturing workers, to professionals pushed into retail work, to exurban Trump-backing owners of ailing local construction or plumbing businesses, to immigrant home care workers, to denizens of the gig economy, and many other categories.The American Bridge approach seems designed to take stock of all these constituencies. It reaches people who voted for Trump but aren’t at all committed to him, people who drift between the parties (Trump made inroads with such groups in 2024), and people who are getting hammered economically (a quite large and varied group these days). Meanwhile, in some of these districts, Democrats are fielding candidates who have biographical roots in this multifaceted working class and are familiar with its struggles. In Iowa’s 1st district, Christina Bohannan is a law professor but grew up in a trailer park. In Michigan’s 10th, Christina Hines, a former prosecutor, has relatives who are autoworkers. In North Carolina’s 11th, in Appalachia, Jamie Ager is a fifth-generation farmer. Note that one of American Bridge’s ads, in Iowa’s 2nd district, features a personal trainer who voted for Trump in 2024. He comes across as representative of gig economy workers, and he now feels betrayed by Trump as he struggles under the weight of war-fueled inflation. As American Bridge president Bradley Beychok said in an emailed statement, working-class voters of all kinds are “pissed” over everything from higher healthcare and grocery costs to gas prices, and “this fall they will make their voices heard.” Economic discontent has plainly widened the possibilities for Democrats in surprising ways. As Lauren Egan reports for The Bulwark, even the Senate seat of GOP incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi is no longer a pipe dream for Democrats, as rural hospitals teeter toward closing and soybean farmers get clobbered amid Trump’s carnage.So the potential for a very, very broad midterm map looms large. Democrats should be contesting territory everywhere. And they appear to be doing just that. Because in an environment like this, the truly unexpected can happen—and it can happen in some very unexpected places, too.

This week, more than 100 former federal prosecutors in Illinois sounded the alarm about the current leaders of the office where they all once served. “Regrettably,” their statement reads, “there is little doubt that actions taken by leadership in the last year have tarnished the reputation of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois.” They list some serious concerns, including the departure of an “extraordinary” number of experienced prosecutors and the “extraordinary collapse rate” of prosecutions. “When judges increasingly call into question the motivation or candor of prosecutors and agents,” they write, “that is a sure sign that a standard has been compromised.” What they have witnessed merits “serious public scrutiny” because the lawyers who work there “affect not only the quality of justice, but the lives of more than nine million residents” in the district. “We write because an educated public is the only hope against overzealous prosecutions,” they conclude. The letter is a remarkable statement of what prosecutors fear: that the public may lose trust in the justice system, or that their own career has lost its credibility. But it’s significant less for the set of concerns expressed than the fact that they were expressed at all. Things must be especially bad, in other words, for federal prosecutors to call for the serious scrutiny of the public.They are that bad and worse. Federal prosecutors hold a lot of power, which is one reason why the Trump administration has leaned so heavily on them to defend its dirty work. While technically U.S. attorneys work for the Department of Justice and not for the president, such distinctions feel quite hollow when the acting attorney general pledges his loyalty and affection to Donald Trump so openly—“Thank you very much, I love you, sir,” Todd Blanche said at a DOJ press briefing in April. No wonder Blanche was officially nominated this week to stay in the job. Before all this, he was best known as the president’s personal attorney. No wonder it seems like DOJ lawyers serve in that role too. Mercifully, some of them are not very good at hiding it.We know how badly some federal prosecutors are performing for the administration for a few reasons. For one, when they fuck up—misleading a grand jury to get an indictment, say, or ignoring a judge’s orders (including orders to comply with previously ignored orders)—federal judges sometimes let us know. Over the past 18 months, a number of federal prosecutors have engaged in apparent misconduct egregious enough that federal judges have rebuked and moved to discipline them. The cases involved may vary in substance—the parties range from hospitals providing gender-affirming care, congressional candidates, and detained immigrants to anti-ICE protesters—but together they tell a story about injustice, influence, and the limits of using the law against its enforcers. It’s often a frustrating story, in which even the most blistering judicial opinion or the most successful exposure of misconduct cannot undo the damage already done by federal prosecutors. But the record each rebuke leaves could be valuable, illustrating what was done to thwart or slow the damage.Judges are understandably critical when their own orders have been undermined, sometimes flagrantly, by the federal government. When U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy chastised federal prosecutors in a case demanding private medical records from trans children, she framed their actions not as regrettable errors but as an abuse of power. “The United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) possesses immense prosecutorial authority and discretion,” the judge began a May 14 order. “As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary. DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.”This admonition followed federal prosecutors’ attempts to go around McElroy, who had quashed a subpoena for medical records, by getting a federal judge in Texas to issue its own subpoena. Their efforts were just one twist in the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against gender-affirming care for young trans people. DOJ has been crucial to the administration’s attempts to paint hospitals that provide such care as engaging in fraud and thus worthy of investigation, even as judges swat them down. Such failures are not (or not only) the mark of people who don’t know how to do their job. In her order, Judge McElroy singled out the most senior prosecutor among them, “who sat silently by as his counterpart, a junior attorney who has been practicing law for approximately six months and had no relevant information, was forced to answer questions about DOJ’s blatant disregard for the proper course of negotiations.” Judge McElroy found that prosecutors had “misled” the court and “misrepresented and withheld information,” and last week she referred those prosecutors to the court’s discipline committee. (The Department of Justice had already said the judge’s allegations were “without merit.”)The administration’s attack on transgender rights is far from the only arena in which federal prosecutors have run afoul of judges when pushing the administration’s goals. Trump’s racist “law and order” campaigns, in which federal troops and agents flooded cities such as Washington and Memphis, have also relied on federal prosecutors willing to bring criminal charges that would typically be the purview of local prosecutors. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro was for a time the face of this campaign, after her office in turn flooded federal courts with sketchy cases in which grand juries refused to return indictments while those charged sat in jail for days. “It’s not fair to say they’re losing credibility. We’re past that now,” said Judge Zia Faruqui, in a hearing on a case that Pirro’s office dismissed after holding a defendant for nearly a week. “We’re acting like this is all normal,” the judge remarked. “What’s to prevent people from just getting rounded up off the streets?”Where federal prosecutors have really shown their eagerness to follow Trump’s mission has been in his campaign of mass deportation, as well as in the project of criminalizing those who oppose it. Across the country, Justice Department lawyers have helped keep immigrants in detention longer, interfered in lawful efforts to return them, and attempted to paint dissent to mass deportations as terrorism. But these prosecutors have also demonstrated their ability to routinely fail in their part of this mission. Hundreds of judges have ruled in favor of immigrants who filed habeas petitions in order to gain release from immigration detention camps, and dozens of indictments against protesters and observers in cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis have been tossed.These might be the cases that have most reliably elicited pushback from federal judges. “In immigration-related cases alone, hundreds of federal judges, who were appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan, have issued thousands of orders against the Trump administration,” as Madiba K. Dennie pointed out at Balls and Strikes. “At least 44 of the judges to rule against the administration in mass-detention cases were appointed by Trump himself.” In February, Judge Laura M. Provinzino of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota held a Department of Justice lawyer in contempt, penalizing him with a $500 fine for each day the government failed to return a detained immigrant’s identity documents.At least one Justice Department attorney, working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota, broke decorum to complain about what such cases were reportedly doing to their well-being. “The system sucks. This job sucks,” said one prosecutor, Julie Le, on an immigration case earlier this year, when U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell demanded to know why immigrants he ordered released were still held. “I wish you could hold me in contempt so that I could get 24 hours of sleep.” This was just a few weeks after federal immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.It’s rare to get such an unvarnished look at one of these prosecutors. But we will soon get more, in a case that offered some of the most egregious examples of their questionable conduct. Last October, six people were indicted in connection with a demonstration outside an immigrant holding facility in Broadview, near Chicago. Federal prosecutors accused them of conspiracy to impede an immigration operation, after an unmarked federal vehicle slowly drove toward them and others who were part of the demonstration. Transcripts in the (now former) Broadview Six grand jury proceedings began to be released this week, after U.S. District Judge April Perry ruled they could be made public, following the collapse of the government’s case. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” Perry said last month. In this case, we saw something even more rarely aired in public: the responses of federal grand jurors to the claims of federal prosecutors, and the prosecutors’ attempts to get an indictment even after some jurors refused.The prosecutors’ alleged misconduct in the case is striking in how unbothered they are by potential consequences. On the record, federal prosecutors appeared to openly violate the grand jury process, seemingly handpicking jurors who sided with the government’s version of events. They improperly spoke to grand jurors outside of court, personally vouched for the strength of their case (something that is expressly forbidden), and convened multiple panels of jurors until one returned the indictment the government wanted. “Are you actually presenting any new actual facts or just a different viewpoint on your side?” asked one unnamed grand juror, not long into the government’s second such attempt. The assistant U.S. attorney, Sheri Mecklenburg, answered: “I’m feeling the skepticism already. Are you going to be able to listen with an open mind?” The juror was direct. “I heard this case like last week and I thought it was a crock of shit then and I still think it is.” “OK. Thank you for your opinion for everybody,” Mecklenburg said. “Have a good evening.” There was then some cross-talk, and Mecklenberg told the juror, “Excuse yourself.” The grand jury foreperson said, “We have to remember we’re recording, as well.” Mecklenburg apologized and said they’d continue. “And thank you to those of you who are staying with an open mind.”That exchange happened in October last year. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois only dropped the case a few weeks ago, however, once it seemed likely that their conduct before the grand jury would be exposed in court. It was this case that prompted the former federal prosecutors in this office to make their public statement, hoping that the public would be activated. These transcripts show: They already were. Their voices had been silenced, but they are no longer.

The Dan Sullivan wars are entering a new phase.

Donald Trump is all over the place on Iran. After insisting a deal was imminent, he’s now threatening more full-scale bombing. He just claimed that “I love the inflation” caused by the war. And in several rants, he insisted that the United States has secretly smuggled 100 million barrels of oil out of Iran and onto the world market (the whole thing appears mostly invented). In an extraordinary exchange, Representative Emilia Sykes sharply confronted Energy Secretary Chris Wright over Trump’s “love” of inflation. Wright finally blurted out: “I would prefer lower inflation.” And Wright stammered before admitting that “um, I’m unaware” of Trump’s oil-smuggling scheme. We talked to former Defense Department official Ariane Tabatabai, who’s now at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She parses through what we know now, explains why Wright’s public meltdown captures the very worst of the Trump administration, and charts what’s next. (After we recorded, Trump resumed bombing.) Listen to this epsidode here. A transcript is here.

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