It’s now been nearly two straight years of embarrassment for America as measles has come back from the dead. As a reminder, America achieved elimination status for this disease 26 years ago and kept that status for more than two decades. It was only when the anti-vaxxer movement gained steam, culminating in the appointment of RFK Jr. to Secretary of HHS, that measles gained a foothold in early 2025. The way a country can lose its elimination status is supposed to be continuous spread of measles over the course of a calendar year. We have, obviously, experienced exactly that the last two years as evidenced in this CDC chart.

The United Nations is meeting soon to decide if America loses its elimination status. I can’t imagine in a world where it doesn’t decide that we have.

According to Politico, a U.N. body will convene this week. They must decide whether America maintains its measles-eliminated status. This pivotal choice will deeply impact the health secretary’s reputation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a known vaccine skeptic. Now, he leads the nation’s response to this massive crisis. As Politico notes, this is a “legacy-defining moment” for him. The situation comes at a very challenging political time. The Make America Healthy Again movement wants to stay relevant. Politico highlights that this movement is “fighting to maintain its political relevancy.”

When we do lose our elimination status, that might be the one silver lining in what is otherwise a national embarrassment. If it takes the U.N. pointing out that our country is so broken politically that we’ve allowed charlatans and fake science to usher measles back into our lives in order to destroy the MAHA movement, or at least the anti-vaxxer portion of it, so be it. Progress isn’t linear, as the saying goes, and perhaps a kick in the teeth is exactly what we need to reinvest in science and health. It’s a shame people had to get sick and die to make it happen, of course, but that’s where we are.

This is a problem that is currently getting worse, not better. And that is due to waning vaccination rates. This map will give you an idea of just how big a problem this is. Note that measles is so infectious that herd immunity protections require roughly 95% of the population to be inoculated against it.

If we lose elimination status and Trump still doesn’t fire Kennedy, he must be impeached when the next Congress is in session. If that isn’t done, the future measles deaths and infections will be on all of their heads.

The Washington Post isn’t what it used to be. While the paper is still peppered with a few decent journalists trying to do good work, the outlet is being slowly strangled to death by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who is steadily dismantling the last vestiges of the paper’s sagging credibility in a desperate bid to mislead the public, prop up oligarch interests, and pay homage to our mad, idiot king.

There have been plenty of examples. Like that time the paper fired a cartoonist who criticized Jeff Bezos. Or that time it announced it was retooling its opinion pages so everyone is super nice to corporations, billionaires, and authoritarian assholes. Or just the general way the paper (particular its political journalism) loves to sanewash and normalize Trump’s historic corruption.

Or last year, when the paper fired its last Black opinion columnist, Karen Attiah. Her offense? She shared some of Charlie Kirk’s own racist words and expressed some personal thoughts on gun control, which Bezos’ editors lamented included some “unacceptable Bluesky posts” that criticized “white men.”

In short Attiah, who hired Saudi-murdered columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 and was central in shaping the former WaPo’s opinion pages, was fired for the cardinal sin of upsetting thin-skinned Republicans and racist rich people. Attiah sued, and won, the arbitrator in the case ruling that the Post’s management’s decision wasn’t based on any actual, meaningful offense whatsoever.

Amusingly, Attiah outlasted both of the Murdoch-orbit editors at the paper (Adam O’Neill and Will Lewis) responsible for her firing. This week she announced that while she could technically have her job back, she wouldn’t be returning to the paper:

“My arbitration win was a monumental victory for unions, for journalists, and for free speech. As the last full-time Black columnist in the Opinions section, I recognized how important the win was for Black journalists, especially those pushed out of newsrooms in recent years.

While I remain proud of the victory, I came to the painful realization that returning to The Washington Post meant coming back without the guaranteed freedom and institutional support to do what I loved: use my voice, seek truth, and serve readers.”

Nature is healing!

Attiah’s firing came last year amidst a backdrop of “free speech loving” MAGA authoritarians desperately trying to cancel anybody who didn’t engage in a distorted hagiography of Kirk and his work (helping rich people spread hateful and divisive internet propaganda among college kids to divide the electorate and normalize ignorance and racism).

Like so many U.S. billionaire-owned major media outlets, the Post has responded to authoritarianism with the ethical equivalent of a wet farting sound. It’s painfully demonstrated the failures of consolidated corporate media, where ownership interest in tax breaks, deregulation, and rubber-stamped merger approvals trumps any interest in objective truth or educating America’s increasingly befuddled electorate.

The extraction class wants the public fighting amongst themselves about issues like race, foundational trans rights, and candy gender; they certainly don’t want an informed electorate supporting things like making billionaires pay their fucking taxes or having competent and well-funded regulators.

So seeing an opportunity in Trumpism, all of our billionaire media owners (also see: the LA Times, Politico, and countless others) tried to reshape reality and blunt the public backlash to their abhorrent, self-serving behaviors. It’s not really working. The result has been ethical columnists and journalists going off and starting their own worker-owned independent ventures and newsletters, while establishment media continues to enthusiastically dismantle whatever was left of its sagging credibility.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Ahead of the midterms, conservative election activists discussed plans to wield a powerful new weapon in the war against fraud: a data tool built by one of their own that could identify suspicious voters and help with contesting their ballots.

The system was put to the test this week in Forsyth County, Georgia, where a member of the county’s election board provided other officials with what he suggested was evidence of wrongdoing: four allegedly dead voters.

But it turns out all four are alive and well, ProPublica determined. The board rejected the attempt to challenge their ballots.

The effort, though, shows that even after last week’s blue wave, those who believe the 2020 election was stolen have continued to relentlessly search for ways to contest Republican losses. In Georgia, Democrats swept statewide offices.

The board member who initiated the Forsyth County challenge, Max Clavijo, is a member of the Election Integrity Network, a group led by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell that works to restrict voting and tighten election laws and rules. Mitchell worked closely with Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election and, since he retook the presidency, has been central to his push to assert greater federal control over voting.

In the run-up to the midterms, on right-wing media and on private organizing calls, EIN participants outlined plans to search voter rolls with a software tool known as ELLY’s Election Monitor and contest ballots the tool deemed suspicious.

ELLY was developed by EIN member Rick Richards. It aggregates public data from state voter files, federal change-of-address records, tax documents, obituaries, property websites like Zillow and other sources. In Georgia, State Election Board members and top staffers have urged counties to use the tool to search their voter rolls for signs of fraud.

Richards talked about ELLY’s national potential on a podcast in late September, on which right-wing media personalities and activists touted its capacity to help GOP candidates contest their defeats. “We can prove the fraud that’s gone on in every state,” one commentator said. “This data will be able to set up challenges to those who lose.”

The following month, on a private call with EIN members and other conservative activists, Richards promised to provide data from more than 3,000 counties to “citizen monitors” and GOP candidates to try to prove fraud, according to a recording reviewed by ProPublica.

In an interview, Richards told ProPublica that he gave Clavijo data on Forsyth County at Clavijo’s request. He said in a subsequent email that their actions were meant to inform the board and remain confidential. Clavijo didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica.

Richards refused to answer questions about whether Clavijo’s effort was part of a wider EIN campaign to contest votes cast in the midterms.

“That’s irrelevant,” he said. “The data is the data. People can use it for what they want to.”

Mitchell, EIN’s leader, didn’t respond to questions about the group’s plans related to ELLY, either in Georgia or nationally.

In the months since some on Georgia’s State Election Board started promoting ELLY’s use, its accuracy has been much debated. The tool doesn’t have access to personal identifiers such as voters’ Social Security or driver’s license numbers or full dates of birth, which increases the potential for mismatches involving people with the same names.

Voting rights groups have called ELLY error-prone. The Cherokee County election director complained to the state board after the tool falsely flagged a county board member’s spouse as dead.

State Election Board members and Richards have defended ELLY. Accusations that the data is unreliable were “horse hockey,” Richards told ProPublica, explaining this was “a Southern colloquialism for B.S.”

Late last week, according to several people familiar with the matter, Clavijo circulated documents to board members and Forsyth County’s election director. Based on data from ELLY, Clavijo questioned whether the names of more than 22,000 people on the county’s voter roll were correct and disputed the eligibility of 69 voters. In addition to four he claimed were deceased, he alleged others had moved out of the county or state, had voter ID irregularities or had registered under fictitious names, giving an initial as their first name.

During the meeting, Clavijo claimed that he was not trying to disrupt the election’s certification or formally challenge the voters, a process outlined in statutes that can lead to ballots being tossed or voters removed from the rolls. (Richards also said they had not formally challenged ballots.) Clavijo said he was merely seeking “to clean the voter rolls” and inform the board so officials could investigate further.

But other board members accused him of doing an end run around the formal challenge process. Barbara Luth, the board chair, said she felt “sorry for” Clavijo because activists were bypassing the challenge procedure “by coming to you and having you submit it.”

Under fire from fellow board members, Clavijo admitted he could not vouch for the data’s accuracy.

“I did not make any explicit accusation that the information was 100% correct,” he said.

The cover letter Clavijo submitted with the challenges said that they had not been verified with any “human review,” according to sources familiar with the matter.

Richards and Clavijo submitted obituaries for the voters they claimed were dead, but there were discrepancies between the information in them and the voters’ records. All of the obituaries said or suggested the deceased lived outside of Forsyth County, which would have made it impossible to vote there. One said the person lived in Arizona.

ProPublica confirmed that all four are actually alive.

Alexis Ramirez, a night-shift nurse, told ProPublica that she cast her ballot during early voting. She was surprised to hear her vote had been contested — and why.

“It’s kind of crazy that they attempted to do that without trying to prove it first,” she said.

Saramma George, another voter Richards and Clavijo claimed was dead, said she was “really angry” to have the validity of her ballot questioned.

In the third case, ProPublica spoke with a voter’s son, who said she was alive but didn’t want to talk to ProPublica. Her “ballot is valid,” he said.

The fourth voter, Chris Strickland, said, “I don’t know where they’re getting their information from, but it’s false. I’m alive. I’m here.”

The majority of the challenges — 38 of them, according to people familiar with the matter — involved voters who’d registered using an initial.

One voter, Alexander Knight, told ProPublica that he goes by his middle name and that the information in voter records mirrors how Department of Driver Services officials suggested he be identified on his driver’s license.

“I am real,” he told ProPublica.

Four other challenged voters said they, too, abbreviated their first names. A. Joseph Guntherberg confirmed he routinely used the same formulation of his name, adding that blocking his ballot would not help the challengers: “My candidate didn’t win.”

Richards said it was up to county election workers to check ELLY’s data — he merely gathers it to facilitate efforts to maintain accurate voter lists.

But at the meeting, Joel Natt, a Republican board member, said the responsibility lay with challengers to justify their accusations. “This has no relevance to anybody here until” they provide solid evidence, he said, “through the proper channel.”

The GOP and Ted Cruz are trying to rush the appointment of Brendan Carr’s personal legal aide Danielle Thumann Severs to the FCC. While simultaneously refusing to seat any new Democrats to the Commission or extend the term of Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who has been a very vocal critic of FCC boss Brendan Carr’s media censorship campaigns and abuse of power.

Their goal is to use the lame duck session to illegally impose a 3-0 FCC majority so they can rush through all sorts of dodgy efforts; from the further “deregulation” (read: elimination of all oversight) of telecom and media giants, to Carr’s ongoing efforts to harass journalists that criticize the President. They should have the votes to confirm Severs, though Democrats can certainly slow-walk the confirmation (recall what the GOP did to popular reformer Gigi Sohn’s nomination to the FCC).

Severs had her first hearing this week before the Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee, and it didn’t go particularly well. She refused to answer basic questions, and generally received an appropriately-cold shoulder from Democrats fresh off of their landslide midterm victory:

“After the American people last week overwhelmingly rejected the MAGA agenda, there is no justification for this committee to advance partisan nominees during the lame-duck period,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said.”

Other Democrats at the hearing promised looming new year investigations of Carr’s numerous instances of illegal destruction of consumer protection and media consolidation limits, as well as his long-list of efforts to trample the First Amendment and undermine public-interest journalism:

“I don’t think Chairman Carr is going to be around more than another three or four months because when we have the gavels in here, he will be here once a month,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said. “And Mr. Carr, if you’re listening now, know you’re going to be in this body once a month, if not more, and in the House of Representatives as well, answering questions, and you don’t have the protection of the gavel any longer.” Luján said Democrats will use “subpoena authorities that you have to respond to so we can get to the bottom of the nonsense and the cover-ups that have been taking place.”

Some Democrats made it clear that as a personal aide to Carr, Severs is effectively just a warm body who’ll exist to rubber stamp Carr’s agenda for the remaining two years of Trump’s Presidency:

“Ms. Thumann Severs, your career has largely been spent serving Brendan Carr,” Hickenlooper said. “[You are] currently Chairman Carr’s senior counsel; previously, you were legal advisor to Commissioner Carr. Your official duties include near-daily meetings with Chairman Carr and working to advance his agenda, amplify his messaging.”

Severs stated she personally helped draft Carr’s efforts to dismantle E-Rate, the $3 billion a year program that helps drive affordable broadband into parts of the country left high-and-dry by the regional telecom monopolies Carr refuses to regulate. Since it’s illegal to simply destroy a program dictated by Congress, they’re trying to effectively erode it while pretending the changes won’t prove fatal.

Severs also refused to address Carr’s ongoing harassment of companies like ABC for their “sin” of hosting politicians Donald Trump doesn’t like, or platforming comedians that made fun of the President’s wife. Carr’s efforts on that front have even involved creating a conspiracy with the help of right wing broadcasters that ABC violated FCC rules by simply hosting newly elected Texas Senator James Talarico.

Democrats, if you’re listening: that last one should be very fertile ground for subpoenas, since it’s clear Carr had Trump friendly broadcasters — including Sinclair and NexStar — alter paperwork to help him pretend that ABC had violated the law (see: pages 3-4 of this ABC/Disney filing with the FCC).

Severs refused to meaningfully answer questions when asked about Carr’s efforts to strip away ABC’s broadcast licenses for the sin of upsetting Republican interests:

“Thumann Severs answered that the FCC “has a responsibility to fully investigate any complaint… and to evaluate that complaint on the merits. I don’t think a decision should be made purely based on someone’s discontent with the content being aired.”

“Based on publicly available material, which is all I have seen on that particular matter, the licenses were called for early renewal as part of an investigation into potential rule violations,” Thumann Severs said today.”

About as weak as you’d expect for somebody hand-picked to prop up Carr’s extremist ideology.

Severs might still be confirmed, but a 3-0 Republican majority would technically be illegal under the Communications Act, potentially putting any FCC rulings under less stable FCC footing. At the same time, Trump’s weakening health and political power will make it increasingly difficult for Carr in the face of companies that are already starting to take his threats less seriously.

The timing of this order by a Colorado federal court is so tight it may not be directly related to another federal court’s frustrated expression of its complete distrust of federal immigration officers, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless.

Pretty much ever since Trump took office for a second time, immigration enforcement has become little more than a wholesale, nationwide refusal to respect rights that have long been granted to migrants. The largest factor — something that has generated more than 10,000 decisions against the administration — is this administration’s decision to re-read long-standing law as permitting what it’s been doing since early 2025: refusing bond hearings to detained migrants.

The Trump anti-migrant machinery has pushed two novel theories to justify its refusal to respect due process rights. It has resurrected the Alien Enemies Act — last seen as an excuse to toss Japanese migrants in concentration camps during World War II — to claim (without facts in evidence) that most of the migrants it has detained are threats to national security. Second, it has decided an immigration law passed in the late 1970s should be read to mean that any migrant is “seeking entry,” even if they’ve already been in the country for months, years, or decades.

While that law allows the government to bypass due process rights when detaining people in the act of illegally crossing the border, it has never been interpreted to mean that any migrant is “seeking entry,” even if they successfully entered the country years ago.

On top of that, immigration officers have been routinely lying about their violent acts and casual rights violations, which range from banal, repetitive brutality to deliberately running people over to actually murdering US citizens in broad daylight on US city streets.

Consequently, judges are pretty fucking sick of ICE’s eternal bullshit. Earlier this week, a federal judge in Oregon released a court order that suggested every federal court in the land stop taking the government at its (written) word and start subjecting federal officers to cross-examination, given how often their sworn affidavits have been devoid of facts.

The same thing is happening now in Colorado. Whether or not last week’s court order (issued in a distant jurisdiction by a judge who cannot set nationwide precedent) was a factor here is unknown. But it is another federal judge deciding ICE is no longer a reliable narrator. If it wants to push an unproven narrative — or otherwise explain why it has refused to follow existing law and recent court orders — the officials who are making these decisions need to explain it to a judge in person.

This is the impetus for this order — one that springs from ICE’s new (and apparently unofficial and legally unjustified) policy of re-arresting migrants moments after they’ve been freed from detention by district court orders. That’s what happened to a migrant who has lived peacefully and productively in the United States for 26 years. The man — identified only as “Emmanuel” due to his ongoing problems with ICE — had his habeas petition granted by a federal court. But his freedom was immediately interrupted by the immigration officers waiting to ambush him at the same courthouse where he had secured a release from custody.

But the day he was released wasn’t the day he would ultimately get his freedom.

“An ICE officer came and said, ‘Oh, I’ll escort you out,'” said Emmanuel. “[He] handed me my bag and said, ‘Ok, you’ve been released,’ and as soon as I stepped out one step, there were five ICE officers that were waiting outside in bulletproof vests and cameras and everything. And they grabbed me, and they said, ‘Oh, you’ve been re-arrested from that release.'”

These actions — which are now SOP for ICE — have resulted in demands for in-person testimony by at least one ICE official from the court handling Emmanuel’s case.

Federal judge Charlotte Sweeney has ordered the field office director for ICE to be in her courtroom Monday morning to address his agency’s practices.

The justice system doesn’t allow this to happen in actual criminal cases. Defendants released by courts are free to go, not just “free” until they run into law enforcement officers who apparently can’t handle a loss in court.

What’s happening here will be seen more often. And hopefully, more of this will include ICE officers and officials actually having to make personal appearances in court where they’ll actually have to explain their actions, rather than just assume some copy-pasted boilerplate is all a system of checks and balances (to say nothing of the victims of these rights violations) are entitled to.

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We’ve now written a few times about Donald Trump’s obvious bullshit SLAPP suit against the BBC. If you don’t recall, the BBC ran a Panorama documentary about January 6th. It ran only in the UK and Trump said nothing about it when it aired. Many months later, some MAGA dipshits on social media start complaining that the documentary misrepresented Trump — after an internal BBC analysis that criticized the editing on the documentary leaked. Specifically, they complained that it spliced together two portions of Trump’s speech to the MAGA faithful, delivered nearly an hour apart, in a way that made it seem like he was more directly urging them to storm the Capitol than he did in context.

It was a blatantly weak SLAPP case for a variety of reasons with the biggest one being that they were suing in Florida and, as you’ll recall from the paragraph immediately preceding this one, the program was never aired in the US. Trump got around this by claiming that VPN usage increased in Florida during the time period when the documentary was shown, and that could indicate that people in Florida were downloading VPNs to watch the video in the UK. At the time, famed First Amendment lawyer Bob Corn-Revere told CNN:

The suit “does not have any legal basis, either on defamation or jurisdictional grounds,” said Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

“This is nothing more than the president’s latest effort to intimidate media companies that he sees as adversarial to his administration,” he said.

And, to be honest, the lawsuit had mostly been backfiring on Trump, to the point that it almost felt he was trying to get out of it. That was because the original complaint said that this documentary damaged Trump’s business prospects, which is kinda laughable considering he’s added billions of dollars to his net worth while being President. So, because the court allowed for some early discovery, the BBC said it wanted to review Trump’s business records, to which Trump flipped out. His lawyers tried to file an amended complaint removing the part about it harming his business, and saying it just harmed his reputation (but still demanding the same $10 billion). The magistrate on the case, Enjoliqué Lett, had said that Trump’s business records were fair game and that he had to submit to a deposition.

Trump skipped the original deposition date, claiming he was busy with official matters (he went to a campaign rally) and has tried to push his deposition off as long as possible, but Magistrate Judge Lett told him he needs to sit for the deposition by December 11th.

For what it’s worth, Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, had also tried to get the magistrate judge kicked off the case, but the (Trump-appointed) Article III judge who was initially assigned the case, Roy Altman, rejected that request.

But… in the interim, something else happened. In August, Judge Altman reassigned the case to a new federal judge, whom the Senate had just approved by a 51 – 46 vote. That new judge, Jeffrey Kuntz, had some controversy about his connections to Trump. You see, prior to being a federal judge, he was a Florida state appeals court judge. And, right around the time of the 2024 election, Donald Trump’s equally ridiculous defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board for giving the prize to news organizations that reported on Donald Trump’s connections to Russia… landed in Jeffrey Kuntz’s lap (on appeal, as part of a three-judge panel).

Jay Willis, at Balls & Strikes, covered the sketchy deal. Basically, Judge Kuntz told Senator Rick Scott to recommend him to Trump for a federal judgeship appointment. Then he got the Trump case. Rather than recusing himself, he took the case, wrote the ruling in Trump’s favor, and then… got nominated to the federal bench. Sketchy sketchy sketchy (Kuntz was actually one of two judges on that same panel who did basically the same thing):

Jeffrey Kuntz, a Florida appeals court judge who sat on the same three-judge panel as Artau, is also up for a federal judicial vacancy in the Southern District of Florida. Like Artau, Kuntz had reached out to Scott’s office in November 2024 to throw his hat in the ring for a federal judgeship. Like Artau, Kuntz was then assigned to the Alexander panel. Like Artau, Kuntz did not recuse himself from the case, and voted in Trump’s favor. And like Artau, Kuntz was invited by the White House Counsel’s office to interview for a federal judgeship that same month.

The reassignment itself isn’t particularly sketchy. It’s how new judges get their caseload. But it does seem kinda problematic that a guy who already heard a Trump case while actively angling for Trump to give him a lifetime appointment immediately lands another sketchy Trump case.

All of that takes us to earlier this week when Judge Kuntz did what Judge Kuntz apparently does: taking a ridiculous SLAPP suit from Donald Trump, and allowing it to mostly move forward, despite the fact that every defamation law expert in the world knows this is a frivolous case (the only part Kuntz rejected was an even more ridiculous claim under Florida’s “Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices” law, while allowing the defamation claims to move forward).

The opinion is deeply problematic on multiple levels. It starts out by noting that Donald Trump has sued a ton of media orgs, and that many of those suits (like the ones against CNN and Dow Jones) went nowhere, which (you know) should be a sign. But, you see, Judge Kuntz sees something special in Donald Trump, and claims that this case is different than all those other cases, because it wasn’t just about a “news entity reporting on a story” but rather “the news entity created the story.” Except… that’s not accurate either. It’s just how they edited the story and editing is still First Amendment-protected activity.

Judge Kuntz also claims that because the documentary was released (in the UK) the week before the 2024 election, it means that the BBC did so “at the time it would have the most impact.” Which, um, yeah. Isn’t that how journalism is supposed to work?

Regarding the fact that the episode was only shown in the UK, Judge Kuntz seems quite taken by the fact that people from the BBC apparently emailed people in the US and suggested they watch the documentary:

Explicitly, Trump alleges BBC sent links to Americans with instructions on how to watch, including a link sent directly to a Florida resident. [FAC, Exs. E-G]. Implicitly, the subject matter of the Documentary involves then-candidate Trump, a Florida resident, with filming and interviews done in the United States. See generally [FAC, ¶31]. BBC aired the Documentary about a resident of Florida running as a Presidential candidate, one week from the election. BBC cannot then “claim surprise at being haled into court in the Southern District of Florida.”

But here’s the thing, this already weak claim to establish a Florida jurisdiction is weakened even further if you actually look at the exhibits cited. It is not — as Trump and the judge claim — the BBC instructing Americans, including a Florida resident, how to watch the film. And it’s not even them promoting the film. It’s literally some people who worked on the film sharing a way to view it to two people who appear in the film.

It starts with someone from the production company (not the BBC) emailing the “Shelby County Ohio Democrats” with information about the film, because someone from that group was interviewed in the documentary, and they wanted that person to be able to see themselves. Shelby County, Ohio, is notably not in Florida. And while the sender cc’d a BBC person, she appears to work for the production company, not the BBC. That company — October Films — is an independent production company that has made programs for a variety of properties. They are not the BBC. However, the sender does note that if the recipient wanted to see the program (on which they are apparently a guest) they would probably need to get a VPN to appear to be in the UK.

Now, the BBC person then does forward that email, but again not to anyone in Florida. Rather they send it, with a Dropbox link to a copy of the film for personal viewing, to someone at the Lincoln Project, the organization of another participant in the film, Rick Wilson (a founder of the Lincoln Project) who apparently does live in Florida. They mention, in passing, “I would obviously also be grateful if you could forward to Rick.” She then replies, cc’ing Wilson. So the only email Wilson got came from his own colleague, not the BBC.

So… this is hardly promoting the film to people in Florida. The leaps that Trump and the judge have to go through: a production team person (not with the BBC) emails someone in Ohio saying the film is going to debut, but because it’s only in the UK, suggesting they’d probably need a VPN to watch it. A BBC person who was cc’d on that email then forwards it to someone at the same organization as someone else who appears in the film with a Dropbox link so they can see how it came out, suggesting that they could forward it to Rick Wilson (who appears in the documentary and happens to live in Florida).

It takes several astounding leaps to say that this creates jurisdiction in Florida.

Perhaps even more troubling, though, is the actual malice analysis. As we’ve discussed, Justice Clarence Thomas has been on a quixotic one-man war against the actual malice standard for quite some time. Since he started, the MAGA world has rushed to build up a rickety justification claiming that there is no basis for actual malice. And it appears that Judge Kuntz is one of the partisan acolytes of this view, based on his long whiney venting, claiming that actual malice is now being criticized (citing Clarence Thomas twice as evidence):

The Court acknowledges several recent criticisms levied against Sullivan. See McKee v. Crosby, 587 U.S. 1172 (2019) (Thomas, J., concurring in denial of certiorari); see also Berisha v. Lawson, 141 S. Ct. 2424 (2021) (Thomas, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari). It cannot be said that Sullivan is grounded in the original meaning of the Constitution, at least not in any meaningful sense. See McKee, 586 U.S. at 1173 (“If the Constitution does not require public figures to satisfy an actual-malice standard … then neither should we.”).

Nor is Sullivan grounded in the history and tradition of the common law. Id. at 1176-77. Common law libel at the time the First and Fourteenth Amendments were ratified did not require public figures to satisfy any kind of heightened liability standard as a condition of recovering damages. Id. In fact, historically the common law deemed libels against public figures to be more serious and injurious than ordinary libels. Id. at 1177 (citing 3 William Blackstone, Commentaries *124) (“Words also tending to scandalize a magistrate, or person in a public trust, are reputed more highly injurious than when spoken of a private man”).

It is logical then, that a public figure like the President of the United States should not be subjected to a heightened standard non-existent at the time of the Founding. Under Sullivan, the chief executive of the world’s most powerful country could be subject to false and injurious statements without a remedy if he fails to satisfy a judge made standard that bears “no relation to the text, history or structure of the Constitution[.]”

The problem is that Thomas’s claims (and Kuntz’s adoption of them) are (like so much of MAGA’s understanding of history) a bunch of ahistorical nonsense. And the argument that the actual malice standard could leave the most powerful man in the world “without a remedy” is equally ridiculous. The President has tremendous power (more than basically anyone else in the world) to get his own side of the story out. The lack of a legal remedy is not the lack of any remedy at all.

At least Kuntz eventually admits that, despite his and Thomas’s nonsensical bellyaching, actual malice is still the standard under Supreme Court precedent for the time being. But he then proceeds to do one of the most ridiculous actual malice analyses I’ve ever seen. First, while every First Amendment lawyer in the world knows that actual malice does not mean “with ill-will” but rather that the content was published knowing it was false or with “reckless disregard” (a much higher standard than mere negligence) to whether it was true or false, Judge Kuntz makes the argument that maybe it can mean ill will.

First, he notes that the Eleventh Circuit — whose rulings set precedent for his own court — says directly that ill-will has zero bearing on actual malice:

It is worth noting that the Eleventh Circuit has held that “[i]ll-will, improper motive or personal animosity plays no role in determining whether a defendant acted with actual malice.

But then he decides he can ignore that, because he believes that when the Eleventh Circuit said it “plays no role” that the Eleventh Circuit (which binds him)… misspoke by taking too “cursory” a glance at what it was citing.

Where Veritas simply quotes and reincorporates the Eleventh Circuit’s footnote in Dunn, the Eleventh Circuit in Dunn relies on the Supreme Court to formulate its position that ill-will plays no role in determining actual malice. See Dunn, 193 F.3d at 1198 n.17. A cursory glance at the footnote shows that the court is citing to Masson v. New Yorker for support, quoting “[a]ctual malice under the New York Times standard should not be confused with the concept of malice as an evil intent or a motive arising from site or ill will.” 501 U.S. 496, 510 (1991). It is unclear the extent to which the Eleventh Circuit interprets this to mean that ill-will or motive plays no role in the sense that it may never be raised in an actual malice nquiry. The Supreme Court in Masser was merely clarifying that the legal term “actual malice” should not be confused with how the term “malice” is understood in common parlance.

So, Judge Kuntz argues that Trump can actually use ill will as evidence of actual malice, so long as it’s offered to show knowing falsity or reckless disregard.

It follows that Trump may plausibly allege actual malice through factual allegations of circumstantial evidence, such as ill-will, improper motive, or personal animosity, when such circumstantial evidence is probative of BBC’s state of mind regarding their knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.

In the business, this is what is known as “motivated reasoning.”

And from there, he suggests that regular negative coverage of Trump on the BBC shows… actual malice. Part of this is he claims that other programs on the BBC reported “false” things (according to Trump) and even though it was different people at the BBC, that’s enough. And he dings the BBC for responding that even if others at the BBC did say false things about Trump that doesn’t mean that this documentary said anything false. Judge Kuntz seems practically offended by this:

Thus, Trump paints a picture that demonstrates the BBC has a record of allowing the publication of false statements in their portrayal of Trump. BBC asks the Court to put on blinders and treat the Panorama team as if they were blocked off from the rest of the organization, ignorant of everything else going on at BBC. At this procedural stage, the Court simply cannot ignore the circumstantial evidence presented. To do so would make it extremely difficult to ever prove a defendant’s subjective state of mind in any defamation case.

Again, that’s not how actual malice works!

Similarly, the BBC pointed out that the BBC’s decision (frankly, a stupid one) to apologize to Trump after he got mad works against actual malice, because it suggests that once they were alerted to the complaint they moved to fix it. But the judge says that their slowness in doing so works against them. He leaves out the fact that Trump didn’t get mad until many months after the doc aired (because he only got mad when culture warriors on social media dug it up):

BBC then argues that the apology “militates against a finding of actual malice.”…

In Hoffman, the court stated that “it is significant and tends to negate any inference of actual malice on the part of the [defendant] that it published a retraction … in the next day’s edition of The Washington Post.” Id. (emphasis added). That makes sense. In the 1970s, next day retraction was likely the fastest correction that could be issued for a printed publication. Today, retractions can be issued near instantaneously for online publications thanks to the internet. The Court acknowledges that media entities, like The Washington Post, or BBC, are not perfect, and make mistakes. However, it cannot be said that a retraction the next day is in the same ballpark as a retraction over a year later, and only after being threatened with legal action. The temporal distance here makes the retraction a weak indicator as to BBC’s state of mind at the time of publication.

Again, the temporal distance at issue is wrong! The fact that it was a year later reflects that when they broadcast it, they thought it was fine (no actual malice). It’s only when they were alerted to it that they made the apology. Thus, any “temporal distance” has to be from the time they were alerted, not the time the documentary aired.

Basically, this entire ruling is a total mess. And, of course, Trump trumpeted the ruling as a big victory.

But, of course, as I noted up top, because of the Magistrate Judge’s order… Trump might have to sit for a deposition that he very clearly does not want to sit for. So… it’s no surprise that the day after the ruling, Trump objected to and appealed the magistrate’s ruling. In it, he argues that the BBC is asking for way too much information about his businesses. He specifically does not want the records of membership applications to Mar-a-Lago to be subject to discovery:

First, the MAL Order erroneously permits the BBC to obtain six years of membership-application counts and initiationfee data from Mar-a-Lago Club, LLC (“MAL”)—a separately organized, non-party private club that appears nowhere in the operative pleading—on the flawed theory that, because the President meets with foreign leaders at the property, the club’s commercial performance measures injury to his “profession, occupation, and trade.” That reasoning improperly revives, through a non-party, the entity-level economic-harm theory that the First Amended Complaint removed from this case.

It also claims that Trump will sit for a deposition, but objects to the demand that he do so by December 11th, saying he will do so in January, and wants the sanctions threat removed because he pinky swears he really will do the deposition in January.

Second, the Deposition Order does not merely require the President to sit for his deposition—an obligation he has never disputed. It warns of sanctions, “including dismissal of the lawsuit,” if the sitting President of the United States does not appear by December 11, 2026, even though he has committed to a defined deposition window of January 11 through January 22, 2027, and even though the only obstacle to that window is a scheduling deadline that the Magistrate Judge acknowledged she has no authority to move.

And finally, he’s mad that the magistrate judge agrees with the BBC that Trump’s early document production in discovery was inadequate. His reasoning is basically “nuh uh.”

Anyway, it appears that we have yet another MAGA culture warrior on the bench in Florida, one willing to twist both appeals court and Supreme Court precedent into a pretzel so his favoritest President ever can go after the media. And all over a documentary that never aired in the US, caused basically no stir when it did air, and only became a grievance months later when MAGA influencers decided to make it one.

As Corn-Revere said when the lawsuit was filed, “this is nothing more than the president’s latest effort to intimidate media companies that he sees as adversarial to his administration.” But now he’s got a guy on the bench handling the case who has already shown a willingness to twist the law for Trump. And thus, the media intimidation continues.

Whether it’s DOGE bros stealing massive datasets and uploading them god-knows-where from Starlink terminals duct-taped to the roof of the White House, to Trump officials and family members having terrible OpSec resulting in their phones being consistently compromised by foreign actors, the total cybersecurity failures of this administration have been wildly under-stated by the press.

Another recent story that’s floating below the mainstream press’ attention threshold: Brian Krebs points out that security firm Layer3 Intel found that numerous White House staffers have been using phones and devices embedded with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent from inside the walls of the White House.

One of the proxy services detected by the firm is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was foundational for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016:

“The proxy tracking company Synthient said on Twitter/X that the activity it saw coming from AS2650 was related to multiple Windows 11 installations of a service called Infatica, a proxy program that is often integrated into “free” mobile and desktop applications. Infatica’s founder Vladimir Fomenko is a Russian man whose hosting firm King Servers was home to six of the eight internet addresses used by Russia’s state security services to compromise databases for election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.”

Layer3 Intel indicates that the proxy exit nodes in use from inside the White House came from six internet addresses, on 26 of the 30 days they monitored, with most of the transfer activity happening between 5 p.m. and midnight, after normal office hours. From the Layer3 Intel write up:

“Most of the activity happens in the evening, Eastern time: about half of it falls between 5 p.m. and midnight, and almost none happens in the early morning. That pattern suggests a person rather than a public guest Wi-Fi network: someone regularly on the White House network late into the evening, whose device is infected with a proxy SDK. Our data shows the exits, not the device or the person behind them.”

Some of these proxy services sell bandwidth for as low as 60 cents a Gigabyte, meaning that for far less than a cup of coffee outside actors can theoretically gain access to some of the most confidential and trusted U.S. government networks. And this is the incompetence we know about.

Historically, White House IT staffers should have caught this sort of thing long before a third-party security firm (which stumbled into this largely by chance). But this is the Trump administration, whose incompetence has been endlessly downplayed by a press that has historically been obsessed with normalizing and sane-washing the most corrupt administration in history.

This sort of stuff is happening endlessly in concert with numerous other warning signs that U.S. cybersecurity integrity has been deeply compromised, from recent revelations that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang having an affair with a Chinese spy, to Jared Kushner having his personal smartphone easily compromised, revealing his numerous dodgy dealings.

Trump’s use of personal, unsecured phones has been an ongoing concern since the first administration. As has his staff’s use of private email services and platforms for government business. You also have Trump’s rushed demolition and rebuild of the White House east wing, the rushed rebuild of which surely adhered to all of the traditional security screening procedures, right? Right? And it’s still not clear what data Musk’s DOGE bros stole from the government using unauthorized on-site Starlink terminals.

We’ve also apparently memory holed the Chinese Salt Typhoon hack, in which Chinese-government linked hackers gained historic access to U.S. telecoms to spy on all manner of government officials. The scope of that intrusion was so massive telecom lawyers told their IT staff to stop looking for additional evidence of intrusion for fear of incurring liability in the years to come.

Trump officials are genuinely too ignorant to believe in stuff like multi-factor authentication (MFA) or Common Access Cards (CAC) / PIV verification. And they haven’t much cared for the kind of strict Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and Secret Service controls required to maintain IT integrity. And this is before you even get to Trump illegally storing classified documents in his personal bathroom.

It is absolutely guaranteed that Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Israeli, and other major security services have been having a field day over the last decade. Hopefully the midterm shakeups result in some meaningful oversight for the first time, but it still seems likely that U.S. government IT infrastructure is going to need a massive auditing and potentially… a total rebuild.

This being America, I suspect a lot of the same companies that helped bring Trump to office will be rewarded with massive IT contracts to help fix the damage they directly contributed to.