There’s a meaningful push afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

Passage can be a challenge due to the relentless lobbying of numerous industries that very much enjoy a monopoly over repair (especially tech and auto). New York State’s law, for example, was watered down by NY Governor Kathy Hochul after passage because tech companies didn’t like it.

The same thing is afoot in Colorado, where tech companies are trying to neuter that state’s right to repair laws. Colorado’s assortment of laws, which first appeared in 2022, have implemented protections covering wheelchairs, agricultural farming equipment, and consumer electronics, making it easier for consumers in all those sectors to afford repairs and gain easier access to parts, manuals, and tools.

But tech companies like Cisco and IBM have pushed Colorado lawmakers to sign off on  SB26-090, the Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair law, which would neuter much of the protections under the pretense of making the public safer. As you might imagine, the companies’ are trying to use a definition of “critical infrastructure” that’s so large and vague as to render all the protections meaningless:

“I can point out at least five problems with the bill as drafted,” Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director at the Repair Association, said during the hearing. “The definition of critical infrastructure is completely inadequate. The definition that has been proposed in this bill is not even a definition.”

While tech company lobbyists have convinced the Colorado Labor and Technology committee to advance the bill, it still needs approval by the Colorado Senate and House, which may prove more difficult now that outlets like Ars Technica and Wired have shed a little light on the effort.

It’s worth pointing out that while eight states have now passed right to repair laws, none have actually enforced them despite numerous, ongoing infractions across countless industries. That’s something that’s going to need to change if state rhetoric on the subject is to be taken seriously.

Never underestimate the stupidity of law enforcement. When things could just be left alone and everything would turn out OK, officers insist on inserting themselves into the equation, ensuring maximum pain and humiliation for everyone involved.

In this case, a Fairhope, Alabama officer decided he couldn’t simply do nothing when coming across a grandmother at a “No Kings” protest. Here’s how this started, as detailed by Liliana Segura for The Intercept:

In the body camera footage, a police officer parks his black SUV on the grass, a rosary swinging from the rearview mirror. He exits his car, moves briskly past a pair of protesters, and points an accusatory finger at the suspect: a 7-foot-tall inflatable penis holding an American flag.

The alleged crime? Unclear. There’s no sound at first, only the silent spectacle of a person in a penis suit turning toward a cop with a stance that says, “Who, me?” A handmade sign comes into view in the person’s right hand. It reads “No Dick Tator.”

You can see the whole thing for yourself here:

It’s really an amazing recording. It includes several high points, including cops trying to stuff a person who’s inside an inflatable penis into the back of a cop car before deciding it might be easier to separate the person and the costume… before struggling to fit the costume itself into the trunk of a cop car. It also includes superbly stupid things like this:

Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb was less amused.

“I’m serious as a heart attack,” he tells Gamble when the audio begins to play on the 14-minute body camera video. “I’m not gonna sit here and argue with you.”

He demands to know how she could possibly justify such an obscene display: “I would like to hear how you would explain to my children what you’re supposed to be.”

Every easily-offended, would-be censor has the same go-to for complaining about stuff they don’t like: “how would I explain that to my children?” I don’t know, man. They’re your kids. Take any approach you want, including ignoring the question. It’s not on the rest of the world to make sure you never have to have an uncomfortable conversation with your kids. If you can’t figure it out, maybe you shouldn’t be in the business of raising kids, much less in the business of enforcing laws.

There are also plenty of far less funny moments, like the fact that three cops decided to get involved in pinning 62-year-old Renea Gamble to the ground for the crime of… well, that was all pretty much undecided at the point the officers decided to enforce their will with their power.

Corporal Andrew Babb obviously didn’t know the law, but that wasn’t going to stop him.

“I said, ‘That’s not freedom of speech,’” Babb continues. “‘This is a family town and being dressed like that is not going to be tolerated.’”

A. It actually is freedom of speech.

B. Every town is a “family town,” unless you happen to live in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

Everything about the arrest is a non-starter. And yet, local prosecutors — propelled forward by supportive local government officials — are still trying to pin criminal charges on Renea Gamble. Mayor Sherry Sullivan claimed the costume was an “obscene display” which would “not be tolerated in Fairhope.” City Council president Jack Burrell claimed the costume “violated community standards” Neither assertion is true, which means neither statement can support an arrest, much less the bringing of criminal charges.

Some of the initial enthusiasm for punishing Gamble was stifled when her arrest went viral, resulting in a nationwide discussion of this ridiculous situation. But apparently the town thinks it’s now safe to proceed with saddling Gamble with a criminal record.

Rather than dropping the case, the city attorney slapped Gamble with additional charges earlier this year: disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement. Her trial, first set to take place months ago, has been delayed multiple times. It is now set for April 15.

The “peace” wasn’t disturbed until Officer Babb decided he was going to take Gamble’s costume personally. And “giving a false name to law enforcement” is really stretching things when all Gamble did was sarcastically respond “Auntie Fa” when officers demanded her name after stripping her of her inflatable penis.

So, the case continues, which is only going to bring more embarrassment to town leaders and law enforcement officials. The backlash that greeted the arrest will return, which means the arresting officer may want to consider employment elsewhere. Hopefully, this will all end with the town cutting a check to Gamble for violating her rights.

Until then, Gamble is going to keep on doing what she does:

Gamble has tried to keep a low profile since her arrest. At the No Kings protest last week, though, the “No Dick Tator” sign appeared in the hands of a masked woman who wore dark sunglasses and a bandana over her face.

It was Gamble, again wearing an inflatable costume.

She was dressed as an eggplant.

People who view dissent as a threat, if not inherently unlawful, cannot ever hope to win. Acts like this only embolden those already involved in dissent and attract others to join the cause. They may have the power, but the people have the inflatable genitals and the will to use them.

Remember when the Biden administration set up something called the “Disinformation Governance Board” and the entire MAGA universe lost its collective mind? It was the “Ministry of Truth.” It was “government speech police.” It was the single most Orwellian thing any American administration had ever done in the history of civilization. Nina Jankowicz, the researcher tapped to lead it, received death threats. The whole thing was shut down within weeks because of the outcry.

Of course, all of it was an exaggeration. That board was actually set up to coordinate efforts to counter foreign disinformation — not to police Americans’ speech. We said so at the time, even while criticizing DHS for the monumentally stupid way they named and rolled it out. The name was terrible. The communication around it was worse. But the underlying mission — helping coordinate the government’s own efforts to respond to (not censor) foreign influence operations — was legitimate and, frankly, important in this era of information warfare.

Well, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just signed a cable doing something that sounds vaguely similar, but way worse. Specifically, he’s directing U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide to launch coordinated campaigns countering foreign propaganda — and the cable explicitly endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool for the effort. It also admits that this is pure psyops work:

The cable instructs those embassies and consulates to pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls “telling America’s story”. Embassies are told to recruit local influencers, academics and community leaders abroad to carry counter-propaganda messaging, an approach designed to make American-funded narratives feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.

“These campaigns seek to shift blame to the United States, sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and even undermine American economic interests and political freedoms,” the cable says. “Using digital platforms, state-controlled media, and influence operations, they pose a direct threat to US national security and fuel hostility toward American interests.”

Notably, the cable tells diplomatic offices to coordinate their work with “the Department of War’s Psychological Operations” – the military unit more commonly known as Miso, or Military Information Support Operations, formerly Psyop, which is part of the Pentagon.

This is far more expansive than anything the Disinformation Governance Board ever even contemplated — and the same people who screamed about the Ministry of Truth are, once again, completely silent.

Kate Klonick has written an excellent deep dive on this for Lawfare, tracing the structural transformation that made this possible. She puts it plainly:

The idea that the State Department would issue a formal cable endorsing a specific social media platform by name as a tool of U.S. diplomacy—let alone military psychological operations—would have been, until recently, almost unthinkable. But the structural transformation that has taken place over years has made the news feel almost ordinary today. It was a transformation that dismantled, piece by piece, the legal accountability, operational independence and institutional resilience that once made such a cozy relationship between government and platforms inconceivable.

And see if any of this sounds familiar:

Rubio identifies five operational goals—countering hostile messaging, expanding information access, exposing adversarial behavior, elevating local voices sympathetic to U.S. interests, and “telling America’s story”—and instructs embassies to recruit local influencers and community leaders to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed.

Why, that sounds quite similar to what the Biden DHS said about the Disinformation Governance Board. Except, suddenly: no partisan freakout. No weeks of stories on Fox News. No screaming in the NY Post about speech police. Gee. I wonder why.

The U.S. State Department is instructing embassies to recruit local influencers to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed. This is, by definition, a covert influence operation. It’s the kind of thing that, when other countries do it, we call propaganda. It’s the kind of thing the Global Engagement Center was specifically designed to expose.

Oh, right. About the Global Engagement Center.

You may recall that one of the early moves of the returning Trump administration was to shut down the GEC, the State Department office specifically created to help identify and counter foreign influence campaigns. At the time, Rubio — the same Marco Rubio who just signed this cable — framed the shutdown as a free speech victory:

Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving. This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.

That was always a lie. The GEC (just like the Disinformation Governance Board) didn’t “silence and censor” Americans. It studied foreign influence campaigns — the kind run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, by ISIS recruitment networks, by Chinese state-linked information operations — and helped expose them. It’s the kind of work that requires sustained expertise, institutional knowledge, and sophisticated analytical capacity. The kind of thing you can’t just spin up overnight when you suddenly realize you need it.

So all of the hand-wringing about the Disinformation Governance Board, the GEC, and the idea that governments were too close to social media platforms was a bunch of nonsense all along. It was always about trying to gain and then keep power, destroying the institutions that dealt with foreign disinformation campaigns until they could capture them for their own purposes.

Klonick traces how Twitter/X became susceptible to exactly this kind of capture:

Musk systematically dismantled Twitter’s trust, safety, and content moderation infrastructure. The teams that had worked, however imperfectly, to maintain platform integrity not just for commercial reasons but to limit the spread of coordinated inauthentic behavior, state-linked influence operations, and targeted harassment were gone within months of Musk’s ownership. With both the corporate accountability architecture and the internal operational safeguards stripped away, the platform’s amplification and suppression mechanics became, in effect, tools that could be deployed at anyone’s, but namely Musk’s, discretion.

Before Musk’s acquisition, the major US tech platforms — whatever their flaws — generally bent over backwards to avoid being captured as instruments of state messaging.

The Rubio cable, on the other hand, specifically endorses X’s Community Notes feature as a tool for countering “anti-American propaganda operations without compromising free speech.” Klonick correctly identifies this as:

…a remarkable exercise in circular reasoning: the government endorsing, for use in state-directed information operations, a moderation tool on a platform owned by a former (and perhaps still current) senior government advisor.

But it’s worse than circular reasoning. Community Notes is a crowdsourced system. Its outputs are determined by which users participate and how they coordinate. While it’s (actually very cleverly) designed to avoid brigading attacks, that does not mean it’s perfect in avoiding manipulation. If the U.S. government can organize sympathetic actors to use Community Notes to surface pro-American narratives as part of a formal PSYOP-adjacent campaign, then so can every other government on the planet. China can coordinate its own actors. Russia already runs exactly these kinds of operations. Iran has entire units dedicated to this. The cable essentially advertises to every adversary exactly how to game the system — and the people who actually understood these vulnerabilities, the trust & safety teams, the GEC researchers, the disinformation scholars, are exactly the people this administration spent years attacking and driving out of their jobs.

Oh, unless they expect Elon Musk to tilt the playing field to their advantage — which is exactly the kind of thing these very same people were loudly freaking out about when Biden was president.

Now, some might point out that the broader “censorship industrial complex” crusade wasn’t only about counter-messaging efforts like the DGB and the GEC. It was also about the Murthy v. Missouri case, which dealt with something categorically different: the allegation that the Biden administration pressured platforms to remove third-party users’ speech. The Rubio cable, by contrast, directs government employees themselves to use the platform for their own messaging. These are genuinely different things.

But the supposed animating principle behind the entire crusade was that the government had no business being entangled with social media platforms on matters of information and speech. Not just “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove user content,” but the much broader claim that any government-platform coordination on information amounted to a sinister censorship machine.

Jim Jordan’s “censorship industrial complex” hearings didn’t just target White House communications with platform trust & safety teams. They went after researchers. They went after the GEC. They went after nonprofits studying foreign manipulation. The message was that any institutional involvement in the information ecosystem was inherently suspect. That principle, it turns out, had an expiration date — specifically, January 20, 2025.

And remember, in the Murthy case itself, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the Biden admin’s communications with platforms constituted coercion. The plaintiffs couldn’t even establish standing because they couldn’t show the government actually changed platform behavior. Meta felt totally comfortable telling the White House “no” — as Zuckerberg himself admitted repeatedly on Joe Rogan, just weeks before telling Elon he was happy to silence people at the Trump White House’s request.

So the same political movement that treated government staffers sending cranky emails — emails that platforms felt perfectly free to ignore — as an existential constitutional crisis now sees nothing wrong with a formal State Department cable directing coordination with a specific privately-owned platform and military PSYOP. If the principle only matters when your political opponents are the ones in the White House, it was always just about weaponizing the systems of government for your own benefit.

Klonick puts the broader structural picture together:

The privatization of Twitter removed all traces of public accountability. The gutting of content moderation infrastructure removed operational resistance. The political alliance between the administration and the tech sector removed institutional resistance. And now a formal diplomatic cable removes the last pretense of arms-length separation between U.S. government messaging objectives and the platforms that carry them.

The legal questions that Murthy left unresolved—about when government pressure on private platforms crosses the constitutional line—will almost certainly be relitigated in this new context. But the more immediate reality is that the internet Americans and global audiences navigate is increasingly shaped not merely by the preferences of platform owners and advertisers, but by the strategic communication objectives of the U.S. government, implemented through platforms that have every financial and regulatory reason to cooperate.

This is the pattern we’ve watched unfold for years: wrap your power grab in the language of the thing you’re destroying. Call fact-checking “censorship.” Call attempts to expose foreign influence campaigns “the speech police.” Dismantle the institutions that actually did the thing you claim to value, then use the resulting vacuum to do exactly what you falsely accused your opponents of doing — only bigger, more openly, and with military coordination.

The sheer audacity of the sequencing is what makes all of this so infuriating. They spent years pointing at the Disinformation Governance Board and screaming “Ministry of Truth!” They shut down the Global Engagement Center while Rubio called it censorship. They destroyed the research infrastructure and the institutional knowledge that actually helped identify and counter foreign influence operations. And now, having cleared the field of anyone who might push back, they’re running their own influence operations through a platform with no independent oversight, no transparency mechanisms, and no institutional resistance — and they’re doing it openly, through formal diplomatic channels, in coordination with military psychological operations.

Klonick closes with the right question:

The question is no longer whether the government can use social media as a tool of statecraft. It already is. The question now is whether any institution—legal, normative, or structural—retains the capacity to check it.

Given that the people who claimed to care about checking government entanglement with social media are now the ones wielding it most aggressively — and spent years systematically destroying every institution that might have served as a check — don’t hold your breath.

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The courts keep pounding the nails home. What this government is engaged in is illegal, on multiple levels. If you subtract the pro-MAGA Fifth Circuit and 6/9ths of the Supreme Court, you have a judicial quorum that says rights are still rights, despite this administration’s claims otherwise.

DHS has issued memos claiming (without facts or law in evidence) that officers can arrest people and enter homes without signed judicial warrants. This has always been false. And it’s not edging any closer to the truth no matter what this administration might say in Truth Social posts and/or court filings.

The administration is losing repeatedly in its bigoted war on non-whites. But it never accepts obvious defeat. It always heads back to court, full of steam and bullshit. And, in most cases, its losses are even more obvious the second time around.

A federal judge in California found on Wednesday that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials had violated a previous order regarding warrantless arrests, and ordered agents operating in her judicial district to fully document their reasons for making any future stops.

The judge, Jennifer L. Thurston of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of California, had previously found that immigration operations in Kern County, Calif., appeared to have been based on racial profiling, with agents making arrests when people they stopped could not produce proof of citizenship on the spot. Last year, she restricted the agency from continuing to carry out random immigration sweeps in the region, citing a “pattern and practice of agents performing detentive stops without reasonable suspicion.”

On Wednesday, Judge Thurston found that border agents appeared to have violated that order when they carried out an immigration sweep last year in a Home Depot parking lot in Sacramento.

The opinion [PDF] doesn’t cut corners or grant Trump’s DOJ more respect than it has earned. (It’s running in the red at the moment.) Multiple people who were arrested following a “targeted” operation, that saws mostly involved federal officers waiting in a Home Depot parking lot in hopes of rounding up day laborers, sued the government. The government has already lost once. This order clearly explains why the government is losing twice. Pretending conjecture is the same thing as established facts does nothing more than inform the court that you suck at your job.

The surveillance two days earlier somewhat contributes to understanding the statistical relationship, revealing that on one prior occasion, two out of a group of 20 individuals gathered in that location were noncitizens (roughly 10%). Yet, that statistic, which leaves the remaining 90% of the group unclassified, does little to dispel the concern that seeking work as a day laborer may be “[a] characteristic common to both legal and illegal immigrants.” See Manzo-Jurado, 457 F.3d at 937. Nor does it demonstrate that the Home Depot parking lot is used “predominantly” by noncitizens seeking day labor work.33 See id. at 936. Rather, the present record reveals little more than that the Home Depot parking lot is “a location . . . frequented by illegal immigrants, but also by many legal residents, [which] is not significantly probative to an assessment of reasonable suspicion.”

Yep. Fuck your “Kavanaugh stops.” Probable cause has never been “wow, they look kinda Mexican.” Hanging around places where you have a [checks government’s claims in support of its actions] 10% chance of catching illegal immigrants isn’t “probable.” It’s an inadvertent admission that you might be wrong 90% of the time.

The upshot of the ruling is this: The government needs to provide individualized reasonable suspicion, if not actual probable cause, to arrest migrants in California. The court does grant some concessions this DOJ definitely hasn’t earned, but at least it adds some guardrails:

The Court declines to preclude Defendants from using “boilerplate” when documenting stops and/or arrests pursuant to the PI Order and this clarification. However, Defendants are cautioned that copy and paste language may give rise to an inference that an individualized assessment was not made.

In short, if the government wants to claim its anti-migrant arrests are supported by reasonable suspicion and/or probable cause, it needs to show its work. And if the only work it can show has been cribbed from other cases, it should expect its overtures to be rejected by the court.

While this may not seem like much, it is at least worth the paper it’s printed on. The Trump administration seems incapable of flooding the zone at this point. It ran out of energy (and personnel) barely over a year into its unexpected resurrection. The DOJ no longer has enough lawyers to do everything the administration demands of it, much less press the dubious “but I’m a king tho” assertions Trump seems to feel it should be doing day in and day out.

Running a fast-break offense and a bet-you-miss defense only works until it doesn’t. The courts are delivering a counter-flood and the DOJ doesn’t have enough loyalists left to overpower the full-court press. The administration is headed towards an institutional collapse because whatever can be considered the “center” of this whirlpool of bigoted fuckwits will never hold. We’ll take every win we can get until we can finally celebrate the demise of a president who seems to think he’s the King George incarnation that makes his voter base so erect it will vote against its own interests.

A federal judge has ruled that President Trump’s executive order last year defunding PBS and NPR violated the First Amendment, and has issued a permanent injunction insisting that executive branch agencies cannot enforce it. But the ruling may come too late to save what was left of U.S public media.

The original executive order resulted in Congress obliterating the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) budget of $1.1 billion for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. With no money left to function, the CPB voted to dissolve itself last January. PBS noted this week that the Trump EO resulted in mass layoffs and the destruction of kids’ programming before Congress even acted:

“Trump’s executive order immediately cut millions of dollars in funding from the Education Department to PBS for its children’s programming, forcing the system to lay off one-third of the PBS Kids staff.”

In his ruling, US District Court for DC Judge Randolph Moss highlighted how the Trump administration completely made up any justification for the cuts, ignoring the First Amendment and violating the law:

“The Federal Defendants fail to cite a single case in which a court has ever upheld a statute or executive action that bars a particular person or entity from participating in any federally funded activity based on that person or entity’s past speech. Perhaps that is because neither Congress nor any prior Administration has ever attempted something so extreme, or perhaps it is because any prior effort to do so has failed. But the most obvious reason is that any such individual ban, based on past speech, would almost certainly constitute the type of retaliation that the First Amendment prohibits.”

NPR CEO Katherine Maher lauded the ruling, even though it comes too late to save much of U.S. public media:

“Today’s ruling is a decisive affirmation of the rights of a free and independent press — and a win for NPR, our network of stations, and our tens of millions of listeners nationwide. The court made clear that the government cannot use funding as a lever to influence or penalize the press, whether as a national news service or a local newsroom.”

As we’ve noted previously, right wingers and authoritarians loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media. A media, if you hadn’t noticed, that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, and countless others).

One of the lasting harms of the cuts will be to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.

Many of those news stations operated in places where quality, local news is difficult if not impossible to find. Local papers have usually either closed or been purchased by soulless hedge funds that are buying papers, stripping them for parts, and hollowing out and homogenizing their coverage. Or “local news” is dominated by right wing propaganda pseudo-journalism broadcasters like Sinclair Broadcasting.

U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media can provide a challenge to their war on informed consensus (I’d recommend Penn State professor Victor Pickard’s writing on the subject).

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

In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace.

The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused of embezzlement; and an investigation into a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating investors.

In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases, according to an analysis by ProPublica.

The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement.

But the number of declinations under Bondi marks a striking departure not only from the Biden administration but also the first Trump term, according to the ProPublica analysis, which examined two decades of DOJ data, including the first six months of Trump’s second term. ProPublica determined the increase is not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals from law enforcement.

In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.

Some of the cases shut down were the result of yearslong investigations by federal agencies such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. For complex cases, the DOJ can take years before deciding whether to bring charges.

The shift comes as the DOJ has undergone an extraordinary overhaul under the Trump administration, with entire units shuttered, directives to abandon pursuit of certain crimes and thousands of lawyers quitting or, in some cases, being forced out of the agency.

In doing so, the DOJ is retreating from its mission to impartially uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe and protect civil rights, according to interviews with a dozen prosecutors and an open letter from nearly 300 DOJ employees who have left the department under Trump. The Trump DOJ, the employees wrote, is “taking a sledgehammer” to long-standing work to “protect communities and the rule of law.”

The change in priorities was outlined in a series of memos sent to attorneys early last year. Trump’s DOJ has said it is “turning a new page on white-collar and corporate enforcement” and emphasizing the pursuit of drug cartels, illegal immigrants and institutions that promote “divisive DEI policies.” Trump, in an address last March at the department, said the changes were necessary after a “surrender to violent criminals” during the past administration and would result in a restoration of “fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

The department prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases in the first six months of the administration, which was nearly triple the number under the Biden administration and a 15% increase from the first Trump term. It has pursued fewer prosecutions of nearly every other type of crime — from drug offenses to corruption — than new administrations in their first six months dating back to 2009.

The DOJ has also closed hundreds of cases involving alleged crimes that the administration has publicly emphasized as enforcement priorities. Even as the Trump administration unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operatives to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, the DOJ declined over 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud. About three times as many cases of major fraud against the U.S. were declined under Trump compared with the average of similar time periods under prior administrations. And while the Trump administration has promised to “make America safe again,” its DOJ has declined more than 1,000 terrorism cases, also more than prior administrations.

Federal prosecutor Joseph Gerbasi had spent years in the department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section helping build cases against major suppliers of fentanyl ingredients in India and China. After Bondi came in, he was left bewildered when his team was ordered to abandon its work.

“All of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out,” said Gerbasi, who retired as the section’s acting deputy chief for policy in March 2025 after 28 years with the department.

The move had an “overwhelming deflating effect on morale,” he said.

Barbara McQuade, who worked as a federal prosecutor in Michigan for two decades until 2017 during Republican and Democratic administrations, said it was not unusual for new administrations to come to office with a few “pet priorities” — such as a focus on violent crime or drug trafficking. But she said those changes usually involved modest adjustments in policy and that most of the decisions on what crimes to focus on were typically made at the local level by the district U.S. attorney in coordination with the FBI or other agencies.

“We would revise those about every five years, not having anything to do with any administration, just because it made sense,” she said.

A DOJ spokesperson, in an emailed response to questions about the spike in declinations, said that in “an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorneys’ case management system,” the department reviewed all pending criminal matters opened prior to the 2023 fiscal year, which included updating the status of closed cases. “This Department of Justice remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe, and the number of declinations is a direct result of our efforts to run the agency in a more efficient manner.”

The agency did not respond to questions about the types of cases declined.

The spike of declined cases began in February 2025 when the department ordered prosecutors to review every open case launched prior to October 2022 and determine whether to close it. Such a review would typically take months, according to one attorney tasked with reviewing cases. A memo, which was described to ProPublica reporters, ordered the review to be completed within 10 days.

Former DOJ prosecutors told ProPublica that they typically reviewed caseloads every six months with supervisors and that closing out languishing cases wouldn’t ordinarily be cause for concern. They said the February directive, however, was unusual. None could recall a similar order.

The directive came as higher-ups in the department had begun making frequent demands for data about specific types of cases and charging decisions, such as the outcome of fentanyl cases, according to former prosecutor Michael Gordon. Gordon, who helped prosecute Jan. 6 cases before moving to white-collar crime prosecutions, said the “fire drills” from officials in Washington became so regular that he grew used to the forlorn look on his supervisor’s face when he showed up at Gordon’s door, apologetically delivering yet another frantic request.

“It was either ‘give us stats we can use to make ourselves look good’ or ‘give us the stats to show how bad things are in this area,’” Gordon said. “It was never productive fact-finding.”

Though Gordon didn’t see the memo, he remembered getting the request to review all cases that had been open for more than two years and report back on their status, entering into a master spreadsheet basic information about any that he wanted to keep pursuing.

“The office was pushing us to close everything by a certain date so that when they had to report up to D.C. they had a low number of open cases,” he said. “You really had to go to bat to keep open a case that was more than two years old.”

Gordon said he was fired by the DOJ last June. He has filed a lawsuit alleging his termination was politically motivated. The department did not respond to questions about Gordon’s comments or his lawsuit. The government filed a motion to dismiss the case late last year, arguing that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. The court has not yet ruled on that motion, and the case is still pending.

Investigations into individuals or corporations declined for prosecution are generally not reported to courts and usually only disclosed in summary form by the DOJ in annual reports. To conduct its analysis, ProPublica obtained declination data from the DOJ and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a center that obtains data through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Here are some of the areas most impacted by the spike in declinations.

Drugs

As president, Trump has spoken frequently about the “scourge” of drugs coming into the country. At the same time, the Justice Department has declined to prosecute nearly 5,000 cases of federal drug law violations, including trafficking and money laundering. The number of declinations were 45% higher than the average of the prior three new administrations.

Gerbasi, the counternarcotics prosecutor, declined to comment on specific cases that might have been declined in his office. But, he said, once Bondi was appointed, the priority in the office became building cases against Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group that the Trump administration has labeled a foreign terrorist organization.

“Tren de Aragua was not anywhere close to the scale or impact of the cartels we were focused on,” Gerbasi said. “But we were told to generate those cases.”

He said his office had to scramble to fly people to investigate local gangs in small towns that were reportedly affiliated with Tren de Aragua. “They never would have merited a full-scale federal investigation,” he said.

“It told me that decisions were going to be based on political appearances and not based on the merits of where investigative resources should be placed.”

The DOJ declined to comment on Gerbasi’s remarks.

National Security

Under Bondi, the DOJ declined more than 1,300 cases involving terrorism and national security, nearly twice what was typical at the start of the most recent new administrations. While domestic terrorism was the hardest-hit program, just over 300 cases involving charges of providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations were also dropped.

The DOJ program handling matters relating to national internal security — which considers cases of alleged spy activity and the security of classified information — saw over 200 declinations, which is four times as many as typical in the first six months of a new administration. Some of the cases related to serving as an unregistered foreign agent, a charge Bondi ordered prosecutors to stop pursuing unless they involved “conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”

Jimmy Gurulé, a former federal prosecutor and George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Treasury Department who investigated the financing of terrorism, said the decline in terrorism cases was troubling.

“The Trump DOJ has been used as a political weapon,” he said. “It’s a question of prioritizing resources. Are they going to be used for national security threats or to prosecute his political enemies and critics?” The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on Gurulé’s remarks.

Labor

The DOJ shut down over 60 union corruption and labor racketeering cases, 2.5 times the number in Trump’s first term. Nearly half of the cases turned down for those offenses were out of the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, which in the past has aggressively pursued alleged union corruption. All were noted as declined for insufficient evidence.

Most of those cases had been opened by Grady O’Malley, an assistant U.S. attorney who oversaw several prosecutions of union corruption while working in the New Jersey office over four decades. He retired in 2023 and was disturbed to learn from former colleagues that the office was shutting down the open union probes.

A Trump supporter, O’Malley said that while he doesn’t blame the president, he worries the decision to drop so many cases could embolden unions that he and his colleagues spent years working to hold accountable. “No one is assigned to do labor union cases, and the unions have every reason to believe no one is looking.”

The New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office said it had no comment on the declination of labor cases.

White-Collar Crime

The Trump administration has pledged to root out “rampant” fraud in federal benefit programs like food stamps and welfare. The controversial surging of federal agents to Minnesota in January began as a stated crackdown on noncitizens allegedly ripping off nutrition and child care programs.

The DOJ, however, shut down more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud in the first six months of the administration, including one targeting a mortgage lender accused by several state regulators of defrauding the Federal Housing Administration. The case was dropped due to “prioritization of federal resources and interests.” The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Alabama, which declined the case, did not reply to a request for comment. The number of fraud cases closed was about double that in the same time period of the Biden and first Trump administrations.

The agency also closed over 100 health care fraud cases as a result of “prioritization of resources and interests” even though the Trump administration has said it is making this area of enforcement a priority.

Among other cases the DOJ determined weren’t a priority: the probe into the Virginia nursing home accused of abuse, as well as investigations in Tennessee into fraud at a national hospital chain and one of the largest Medicaid managed care companies.

The Western District of Virginia U.S. attorney’s office, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on the nursing home case. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in the Middle District of Tennessee said the office does not comment on investigations that do not result in public charges.

The DOJ’s Antitrust Division, which focuses on preventing big businesses from creating harmful monopolies, also declined an unusually high number of cases in Trump’s second term. More than 40 cases were dropped within the first six months of Bondi’s tenure. That’s more than double the number declined in the same time period by the prior three new administrations.

Despite the declinations, the department said it charged slightly more people with fraud in 2025 compared with the final year of the Biden administration, and those cases alleged larger financial losses.

Promises Kept

The DOJ under Bondi has also rapidly pursued many of the priorities laid out in Trump’s early executive orders and her own “first day” directives to staff.

Trump in February 2025 issued an executive order pausing new investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits citizens and companies from bribing foreign entities to advance their business interests. The order asked the attorney general to review and “take appropriate action” on any existing probes to “preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives.”

In the first six months, Bondi’s DOJ shut down 25 such cases, which is more than the combined number dropped by the prior three new administrations over the same time period. One of the cases declined for prosecution involved a major car manufacturer, which had reported possible anti-bribery violations to federal investigators involving a foreign subsidiary. The DOJ declined the case for prosecution last June, citing the “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”

On her first day, Bondi ordered a review of criminal prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, which prohibits people from illegally blocking access to abortion clinics and places of worship. The department dropped as many cases under the act in its first six months as the past three new administrations combined, over the same time frame. Bondi’s order focused on “non-violent protest activity,” although at least one of the closed cases was being investigated as a violent crime. The DOJ has since charged protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and journalists in Minneapolis under the FACE Act. The defendants in the case have pleaded not guilty.

The agency closed three times the number of cases alleging environmental crimes as the Biden administration did and one-and-a-half times as many as compared with Trump’s first term. The declinations came as the DOJ reassigned and cut prosecutors working on environmental cases. One-fifth of all of the dropped environmental protection cases were shut down for “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”

The Supreme Court has now issued its decision in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. This was a case where Cox, a broadband provider, had been held liable for the alleged copyright infringements of its users, in this case via filesharing. It appealed, arguing that such secondary liability was not something that copyright law allowed. And the Supreme Court has now agreed. Cox won its appeal, in a pretty big way. But the implications may be even bigger, for copyright law, but especially for the Internet because, once again, the Court has limited secondary liability for platforms—and that’s a big deal for Internet law.

Setting the stage

While direct liability is about holding a wrongdoer responsible for their actions, secondary liability is about holding someone else liable for the wrongdoer’s actions. It’s a concept that comes from common law, but it has historically been limited in its applicability because it can be so chilling to helpful behaviors we might want to encourage—like platforms providing Internet services—when engaging in them can put the helper on the hook if someone they helped does something wrong. Our sense of justice and fair play also tends to want there to be more culpability on the part of the helper before it would seem right to subject them to shared liability with whomever they helped.

But that restraint has been diminishing in modern jurisprudence. In the copyright space it started to be lost a century ago, as some expansive theories of secondary copyright liability began to take hold allowing defendants to be held liable for other people’s infringements. Although the Supreme Court’s 1984 Sony v. Universal Music decision held the line on this expansion, where Sony was not held liable for the fact that people could use its VCRs to infringe copyrights because the VCR was also capable of substantial non-infringing uses as well, liability theories continued to expand up through the Court’s 2005 decision in MGM Studios v. Grokster, where it found Grokster liable for other people’s filesharing, and beyond. This case of Cox v. Sony is one of several similar cases that have been working their way through lower courts, where broadband ISPs were being held liable for the filesharing of their users using secondary liability theories that were even more expansive than anything the Supreme Court had previously endorsed.

And in the Internet law space secondary liability pressure has continued to increase as well, both by platforms becoming subject to more and more regulatory pressure predicated on liability that would attach based on how people used their systems if the platforms didn’t take active steps to curb those uses, and by the statutory protection that could have shielded them from it, like Section 230 and Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, starting to be weakened in favor of allowing liability. There may be several reasons for this trend, but one big one is that the more accepted secondary liability has been in copyright law, and the more tolerated the censorial consequences of such pressure in copyright law have been, the more it seemed reasonable to apply secondary liability to other forms of liability as well, censorial consequences be damned. Which is why this case is such a big deal, because it helps put the brakes on that platform liability trend.

The decision itself

As the Court noted in its decision, the copyright statute itself only provides for direct liability for infringement. [Majority p.6]. So if there’s going to be secondary liability, it will be something for the Courts to infer using traditional common law principles. [Concurrence p.3-4]. Over the years such inferences have led courts to fine to two avenues for there being secondary copyright infringement: “contributory” liability and “vicarious” liability. [Majority p.2]. “Vicarious” liability wasn’t an issue in this case because the Fourth Circuit had already concluded that Cox did not “receiv[e] a direct financial benefit from its subscribers’ infringement,” and the Court had declined to review Sony’s appeal of that aspect of the decision. [Majority p.6]. But with respect for contributory liability, the Court says that it can attach for only two reasons: because a defendant has distributed or provided a product or service that is incapable of substantial non-infringing uses (which it took from the Sony decision), or a defendant has induced another to infringe (which it took from Grokster).

The provider of a service is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement if it intended its service to be used for infringement. To establish that a provider intended its service to be used for infringement, a copyright owner must show one of two things. First, it can show that a party affirmatively “induc[ed]” the infringement. Or, second, it can show that the party sold a service tailored to infringement. [Majority p.2]

Furthermore, contributory liability could only apply when there was the intent that the defendant’s service be used for infringement.

The provider of a service is contributorily liable for the user’s infringement only if it intended that the provided service be used for infringement. The intent required for contributory liability can be shown only if the party induced the infringement or the provided service is tailored to that infringement. A provider induces infringement if it actively encourages infringement through specific acts. […] A service is tailored to infringement if it is “not capable of ‘substantial’ or ‘commercially significant’ noninfringing uses.” [Majority p.7]

And perhaps more importantly, the Court found that intent could not be construed by the defendant having some knowledge that infringement could be occurring.

This Court has repeatedly made clear that mere knowledge that a service will be used to infringe is insufficient to establish the required intent to infringe. In Kalem Co., the Court explained that “mere indifferent supposition or knowledge on the part of the seller” that the buyer will use the product unlawfully is “not enough” to make the seller liable for the buyer’s conduct. 222 U. S., at 62. In Sony, the Court explained that “[t]here is no precedent in the law of copyright” for liability based only “on the fact that [the defendant] has sold equipment with constructive knowledge of the fact that its customers may use that equipment to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted material.” 464 U. S., at 439. And, in Grokster, the Court confirmed that “a court would be unable to find contributory infringement liability merely based on a failure to take affirmative steps to prevent infringement.” 545 U. S., at 939, n. 12. [Majority p.8-9]

Ultimately, the Court found that neither theory of contributory liability applied to Cox because it lacked the intent for its services to be used for infringement.

Thus, Cox is not contributorily liable for the infringement of Sony’s copyrights. Cox provided Internet service to its subscribers, but it did not intend for that service to be used to commit copyright infringement. Holding Cox liable merely for failing to terminate Internet service to infringing accounts would expand secondary copyright liability beyond our precedents. Cox neither induced its users’ infringement nor provided a service tailored to infringement. As for inducement, Cox did not “induce” or “encourage” its subscribers to infringe in any manner. Id., at 930. Sony provided no “evidence of express promotion, marketing, and intent to promote” infringement. Id., at 926. And, Cox repeatedly discouraged copyright infringement by sending warnings, suspending services, and terminating accounts. As for providing a service tailored to infringement, Cox’s Internet service was clearly “capable of ‘substantial’ or ‘commercially significant’ noninfringing uses.” Id., at 942 (Ginsburg, J., concurring). Cox did not tailor its service to make copyright infringement easier. Cox simply provided Internet access, which is used for many purposes other than copyright infringement. [Majority p.9].

In a concurring opinion, Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Jackson, took issue with the majority’s analysis, raising the concern that there were more possible vectors of secondary liability than the two the majority addressed, like “aiding and abetting” liability, and that prior precedent had left open the possibility that they could apply. Yet the majority here had not only ignored these other approaches but effectively shut the door to them ever applying in the copyright space.

The majority holds that Cox is not liable solely because its conduct does not fit within the two theories of secondary liability previously applied by this Court. In so doing, the majority, without any meaningful explanation, unnecessarily limits secondary liability even though this Court’s precedents have left open the possibility that other common-law theories of such liability, like aiding and abetting, could apply in the copyright context. [Concurrence p.1]

Her concurrence was a concurrence, however, and not a dissent, because she, too, found that even aiding and abetting liability wouldn’t apply to Cox because it also lacked the intent such liability required.

Plaintiffs must prove that Cox intended to aid, and therefore help make succeed, copyright infringement committed by those who use its network. To do so, plaintiffs point out that Cox, having received copyright-violation notices, knew that specific connections it services have been, and will continue to be, used to infringe copyrights. Because Cox nonetheless continued to service those connections, plaintiffs argue that the jury could have found that Cox intended to facilitate infringement committed using those connections. This record, however, cannot support finding the necessary intent for aiding-and-abetting liability to attach. To begin, Cox is merely supplying internet service to its customers. Nothing about that conduct is inherently culpable: Most internet traffic is lawful, and supplying an internet connection is just as consistent with lawful purposes as it is with unlawful purposes. See id., at 292 (“[R]outine and general activity that happens on occasion to assist in a crime . . . is unlikely to count as aiding and abetting”). Nor have plaintiffs shown that Cox intended to aid specific instances of infringement. That is because, based on plaintiffs’ evidence, Cox does not actually know that specific users will commit infringement using Cox’s network. Cox supplies internet connections to a wide range of customers, ranging from single users all the way to smaller regional ISPs. When Cox receives a copyright violation notice, however, the notice specifies only which connection was used to infringe, not who used it to commit infringement. [Concurrence p.10-11]

The implications

Despite the disagreement between Justices Sotomayor and Thomas, the decision is still good news for platforms. Even if she’s right and secondary liability may now technically be more limited than it should be in the copyright context, the upshot is that it’s still limited, and the decades, if not century-long expansion of secondary liability for copyright has now been halted. And even if her view of a more expansive catalog of secondary liability sources were to eventually be applicable, even per the concurrence these sources would still require more careful and limited application than has been the trend.

All of which is good for several reasons. First, because it brings copyright law back in line with general common law doctrine that counsels restraint in applying secondary liability. Copyright law had started to be treated as exceptional, where that restraint was cast aside with little policy justification, especially given that even Congress itself was not building secondary liability into its own copyright statute. Furthermore, by bringing copyright law back in line with traditional common law principles it means it can no longer stand as a model to encourage secondary liability expansion with respect to other forms of liability. For too long the exception had started to become the rule, where an attitude of “well if it’s ok for copyright it must be ok for this…” so having the Supreme Court say it is not actually ok for secondary copyright liability to be so expansive will hopefully be tempering for all forms of secondary liability.

It is also significant that both the majority and concurring opinions express concerns with how “knowledge” has often been construed to equate to culpable conduct. Neither accepts that what Cox technically “knew” about potential user infringement could amount to culpability. Sony had argued that because Cox hadn’t (by and large) terminated accused infringers it was therefore liable for their infringements, and this theory was largely rejected. Indeed, both authoring justices seemed especially disturbed by the fact that IP addresses were being used as a proxy for knowledge of an individual infringement when, given that so many connections were shared by households, coffee shops, hospitals, or other institutions, such an inference was often impossible to arrive at. [Majority p.3].

Given this degree of removal from the infringing activity and Cox’s incomplete knowledge, Cox cannot be found to have intended to aid in any specific instance of infringement committed using the connection that Cox provides to the regional ISP. The same is true for connections Cox provides to university housing, hospitals, military bases, and other places that are likely to have many different users. Without proof that Cox knew more about individual instances of infringement, and without evidence of “pervasive, systemic, and culpable assistance” needed to support a more generalized theory of liability, see Twitter, 598 U. S., at 502, plaintiffs have at most shown that Cox was “indifferent” to infringement conducted via the connections it sells. Id., at 500. Mere indifference, however, is not enough for aiding and abetting liability to attach. Smith & Wesson, 605 U. S., at 297. [Concurrence p.12]

It’s also the practical effect of this decision on platforms that stands to be most important for the Internet. The fear of expansive secondary liability has provided immense pressure on platforms to proactively, if not also needlessly, censor the user expression they facilitate in order to avoid it. It certainly has in the copyright space, where platforms have had to remove speech, and even speakers, in an attempt to avoid it, and there has been increasing concern that such secondary liability for other forms of alleged wrongdoing would result in platforms finding themselves taking similar censorial action against other expression they facilitate in order to avoid it as well. They still potentially could, if such secondary liability is prescribed by statute. But there are now several Supreme Court decisions that such a statute would need to overcome: this one, which says that such liability would be an exception from traditional common law rules, and NRA v. Vullo, which points out how statutes seeking to censor via regulatory pressure on intermediaries is unconstitutional, should a regulator try to statutorily create such an exception anyway.

This decision should also hopefully take some pressure off the statutory protections from liability that platforms still depend on, namely the DMCA and Section 230. Indeed, with this decision we’ve come a long way from 2020 when Justice Thomas terrified everyone who cares about the Internet by waxing poetic about whether it was time to revisit the jurisprudence allowing Section 230 to work the way it does. Without Section 230 doing its job of insulating platforms from liability in the user expression they facilitate, and liability from how they moderate it, it would make it difficult if not impossible to even have Internet platforms available to do either of those important things that make the Internet work. And the same with the DMCA, which protects platforms from the copyright liability that Section 230 doesn’t cover, although its protection has been more porous, which is why platforms have had to take down so much expression in order to avoid copyright liability that could potentially adhere in the statutory protection’s coverage gaps.

The decision doesn’t obviate the statutory protection, however, as Justice Sotomayor worried. In her concurrence she wondered what the point of the DMCA would be after this decision if there is no secondary liability to be had without it. [Concurrence p.5-7]. For his part, Justice Thomas noted that it would still provide a defense, but no more could the potential failure to qualify for a safe harbor be automatically considered the grounds for liability. [Majority p.10]. But both the DMCA and Section 230 still have an important job to play. After all, they still protect platforms from being drained by unmeritorious litigation because it’s the cost of the defense and not just the potential liability that are so destructive to platforms ability to be platforms. As it is, we’ve already lost platforms who were bankrupted by the cost of finding out they weren’t liable, and we still need the statutory protection, for both copyright, with the DMCA, and everything else, with Section 230, to operate to make sure no more platforms will suffer a similar extinctive fate.

But it does make both statutes a lot less load-bearing in how they insulate platforms from that actual liability itself, because with this decision, as well as the earlier Twitter v. Taamneh decision—both ironically written by Justice Thomas—underlying liability should now be a lot harder to find.

We’ve written at length about the dangers of the recent court rulings in California and New Mexico that say social media companies can be held responsible for certain uses of their platforms via product design liability. Recently, Mike joined FIRE’s So to Speak podcast hosted by Nico Perrino to discuss the rulings and the concerns they raise, and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Leave it to the president that makes us nostalgic for Nixon-era corruption to claim that a law Nixon made necessary is no longer a law.

The Presidential Records Act was summoned into existence by Nixon’s resignation and his subsequent efforts to destroy records generated by his office as he was fumbling his way towards impeachment. It’s only fitting that the only president to challenge this law is someone who makes Nixon’s corruption look semi-competent.

No one was asking — at least outside of the White House — for the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to weigh in on this law. But weigh in it did, tipping the scale heavily towards “Let Trump do whatever he wants,” despite Supreme Court precedent to the contrary. (h/t Jamal Greene)

The OLC issued this opinion [PDF] last Thursday. It basically says Trump isn’t obligated to turn over records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) following his second term as president. Presumably, the opinion is also retroactive, which would prevent NARA from continuing to demand records from his first presidency — something that has led to a lot of the litigation Trump engaged in following his 2020 loss, much of which is quoted by the DOJ OLC in support of elevating Trump above the law yet again.

I’m sure the Supreme Court — the one “stacked” by Trump himself — has inured itself Trump’s steady stream of verbal abuse at this point. But I’m pretty sure the OLC telling the Supreme Court its own precedent is invalid isn’t going to win the DOJ any friends when it comes time to defend this legal opinion in court.

Nonetheless, that’s what the OLC does here. Repeatedly.

Nixon v. Administrator is not only distinguishable. It was also wrong in concluding that the PRMPA’s “regulation of the disposition of Presidential materials within the Executive Branch” was not “a violation of the principle of separation of powers.”

[…]

Nixon v. Administrator was also mistaken in reasoning that the PRMPA was not “unduly disruptive of the Executive Branch” […]

[…]

Nixon v. Administrator was wrong to suggest that the executive privilege provisions of the PRMPA avoided separation of powers concerns, and those concerns apply even more strongly to the PRA.

That’s the sort of thing that only a true Trump acolyte could write. That acolyte would be T. Elliot Glaser, assistant attorney general, who was previously best know for this:

In 2020, Gaiser worked as legal counsel for Donald Trump‘s 2020 presidential campaign.^[14] White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany testified before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack that she considered him an expert on constitutional law. Gaiser worked on election litigation after the 2020 presidential election and produced a speech that rejected the results of the election. According to McEnany, the speech appeared similar to one Trump later delivered, and Gaiser “mentioned in passing” the theory that vice president Mike Pence could refuse to recognize electors from certain states.^[4]

It’s great to know that yet another election denier is in a federal position of power, especially with mid-term elections only months away. Prior to this, Gaiser clerked for three federal judges: Edith Jones, Neomi Rao, and (of course) Justice Samuel Alito.

Expecting Gaiser to do anything else but propel forward the administration’s presidents-are-kings-actually theory of executive power is delusional. So is Gaiser’s opinion, which simply says everything prior to this legal memo — including Supreme Court precedent regarding a law that’s nearly 50 years old — is wrong.

Either the administration is certain there will never be another regime change or it’s too stupid to realize Democratic Party presidents will have access to the same theory of power being pushed here, which is going to make them look like idiots when it’s being used against them. Neither option is preferable, and there’s a good chance it’s a 50/50 blend of both.

The silver lining is that this isn’t enforceable in any way. But it will have immediate negative effects. It will make freeing up documents from Trump’s term more difficult. And it will keep NARA from attempting to archive anything its does manage to obtain until the (completely illegitimate) legal questions are settled.

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Since the New York Times published its semi-viral big profile of Medvi last week — the “AI-powered” telehealth startup that it breathlessly described as a “$1.8 billion company” supposedly run by just two brothers — I’ve had multiple friends and family members send me the article with some version of the same message: “Can you believe this guy built a billion-dollar company with AI? Why haven’t you done this?” The story is making rounds, and giving people the impression that with a ChatGPT account and a little bit of marketing know-how, you too could be raking in millions every month.

The problem is that most of the story is utter nonsense.

Let’s start with the headline number itself. The NYT admits — buried deep in the piece — that Medvi “has not raised outside funding” and “has no official valuation.” A company’s value is typically established by investors, an acquisition offer, or public market pricing. Medvi has none of those. What it has is a revenue run rate — a projection based on early-2026 sales extrapolated across a full year. Calling that a “$1.8 billion company” is like calling someone who found a twenty on the sidewalk a “future millionaire.” Any business reporter should know the difference. Even the NYT tips its hand:

Medvi is technically not a one-person $1 billion company, since Mr. Gallagher hired his brother and has some contractors. The start-up, which has not raised outside funding, also has no official valuation.

“Technically not” doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there.

But the misleading valuation is almost the least of it. Even if you accept revenue as the relevant metric, how sustainable is that run rate for a company that just got an FDA warning letter, is facing a class action lawsuit for spam, has a key partner being sued over allegations that a major product doesn’t actually work, and is operating in an industry that regulators are actively trying to rein in?

Oh, wait, did the NYT forget to mention all of those things? They sure did! Not to mention the legions of fake, apparently AI generated doctors and patients who keep showing up in Medvi advertisements. Yes, the NYT eventually alludes to some of that, but it claims these were mere “shortcuts” that were fixed last year (they weren’t).

That said, you can feel the pull of the narrative that seduced the NYT: a scrappy founder with a rags-to-riches backstory, two brothers taking on the world, AI tools stitching it all together, Sam Altman himself anointing the achievement as proof that his prediction of a “one man, one billion dollar company, thanks to AI” was correct.

It’s a hell of a story. The problem is that almost none of it holds up to even the most basic scrutiny, and the fact that the New York Times — the New York Times — fell for it (or worse, didn’t care) is an embarrassment. As much as I’ve made fun of the NYT for its bad reporting over the years, this is (by far) the worst I’ve seen. They didn’t just misunderstand something, or try to push a misleading narrative, they got fully played on a bullshit story that any competent reporter or editor should have realized from the jump. This one stinks from top to bottom.

Medvi’s success has very little to do with “AI” and quite a lot to do with fake doctors, deepfaked before-and-after photos, misleading ads, probable snake oil, and the kind of old-fashioned deceptive marketing that has been separating marks from their money for centuries. The only thing AI really “turbocharged” here was the company’s ability to generate bullshit at scale. Oh, and also the NYT somehow missed out on the FDA already investigating the company, as well as the multiple lawsuits accusing the company and its partners of extraordinarily bad behavior.

Let’s start with what the NYT actually published. Reporter Erin Griffith’s piece reads like a press release that the NYT re-formatted as a newspaper article:

Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his start-up off the ground.

From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself.

His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.

Mr. Gallagher then hired his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales.

A $1.8 billion company with just two employees? In the age of A.I., it’s increasingly possible.

And then, because no AI hype piece would be complete without the requisite papal blessing from San Francisco:

In an email, Mr. Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech C.E.O. friends over when such a company would appear, and that he “would like to meet the guy” who had done it.

Altman “would like to meet the guy.” Well of course he would! The NYT hand-delivered him the perfect anecdote for his next AI hype session. The reporter seemingly solicited that quote to validate a pre-existing thesis: “Sam Altman was right about one-person billion-dollar AI companies.” The fact that the company is a dumpster fire of regulatory violations and consumer fraud was, apparently, a secondary concern to the “Great Man and A Great AI” narrative of innovation. This piece was built around a thesis — Sam Altman was right — and then a company was located to prove it.

To its minimal credit, the NYT does kind of acknowledge — eventually, if you make it past the thirtieth paragraph — that things weren’t entirely on the up and up:

Medvi’s initial website featured photos of smiling models who looked AI-generated and before-and-after weight-loss photos from around the web with the faces changed. Some of its ads were AI slop. A scrolling ticker of mainstream media logos made it look as if Medvi had been featured in Bloomberg and The Times when it had merely advertised there.

I mean… shouldn’t that have raised at least one or two red flags within the NYT offices? Medvi’s website featured a scrolling ticker of media logos — including the New York Times logo — to make it look like these outlets had written about the company, when they hadn’t. A year ago, Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré had even called this out directly (along with Medvi’s penchant for bullshit AI slop advertising).

Just underneath these images, MEDVi includes a rotating list of logos belonging to websites and news publishers, ranging from health hubs like Healthline to reputable publications like The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Forbes, among others — suggesting that MEDVi is reputable enough to have been covered by mainstream publications.

…. But… there was no sign of MEDVi coverage in the New York Times, Bloomberg, or the other outlets it mentioned.

And then, despite this, the New York Times went ahead and wrote the glowing profile that Medvi had been falsely claiming existed. The paper of record became the validation that the fake credibility ticker was trying to manufacture.

And the NYT frames all of what most people would consider to be “fraud” as mere “shortcuts” that the founder later “fixed.” Eighteen paragraphs after burying the admission, it reports:

That gave Matthew Gallagher breathing room to fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers.

“Shortcuts.” Using deepfake technology to steal strangers’ weight-loss photos from across the internet, alter their faces with AI, give them fake names and fabricated health outcomes, and pass them off as your own satisfied customers — that’s a “shortcut.” Ctrl-F is a shortcut. This sounds more like fraud.

And it turns out those “shortcuts” hadn’t actually been fixed at all. As Futurism’s Dupré reported in a follow-up piece published after the NYT article:

As recently as last month, nearly a year after the NYT said that Medvi had cleaned up its act, an archived version of Medvi.org shows that it was again displaying before-and-after transformations of alleged customers. They bore the same names as before — “Melissa C,” “Sandra K,” and “Michael P” — and again listed how many pounds each person had purportedly lost and the related health improvements they apparently enjoyed.

Even though they had the same names, these people that the site now called “Medvi patients” now looked completely different from the original roundup of Melissas, Sandras, and Michaels. Worse, some of the images now bore clear signs of AI-generation: the new Sandra’s fingers, for example, are melted into her smartphone in one of her mirror selfies.

They kept the same fake names and the same fake weight-loss numbers but swapped in entirely different fake people. What the NYT claims was “fixing shortcuts” appears to actually be just “updating the con.”

In a great takedown video by Voidzilla, it’s revealed that at least one set of original images appeared to have been sourced from Reddit forums on weight loss having nothing to do with Medvi, and even with the modified images it used, it massively overstated how much weight the original person claimed to have lost. And while Medvi later switched out the photos with someone totally different, they kept the same name and same false weight loss claims.

And again, all of this was publicly known information that Griffin or her editors could have easily found with some basic journalism skills. We already mentioned that Futurism article from May of 2025, nearly a full year before the NYT piece ran. That investigation traced the deepfaked before-and-after photos back to their real sources, found that a doctor listed on Medvi’s site had no association with the company and demanded to be removed, and documented the AI-slop advertising. That investigation was widely available. A Google search would have found it.

But the fake photos and fraudulent branding are almost quaint compared to what the NYT chose not to mention at all. Six weeks before the NYT piece was published, the FDA sent Medvi a warning letter for misbranding its compounded drugs. The letter admonished Medvi for marketing its products in ways that falsely implied they were FDA-approved and for putting the “MEDVI” name on vial images in a way that suggested the company was the actual drug compounder. The letter warned:

Failure to adequately address any violations may result in legal action without further notice, including, without limitation, seizure and injunction.

The NYT did not mention this letter. And yes, Gallagher now insists that the FDA letter was targeting an affiliate that was using a nearly identical name, and it was that rogue affiliate that was the problem. But the letter is addressed to MEDVi LLC dba MEDVi, which is the name of his company. If he’s allowing affiliates to use his exact name, then that alone seems like a problem. Indeed, it certainly seems to highlight how this is all just, at best, a pyramid scheme of snake oil salesmen, where Gallagher has affiliates willing to deceive to sell more snake oil.

Separately, on March 20, 2026 — thirteen days before the NYT piece ran — a class action lawsuit was filed against Medvi in the Central District of California alleging that the company uses affiliate marketers to blast out deceptive spam emails with spoofed domains and falsified headers. The complaint alleges Medvi is responsible for over 100,000 spam emails per year to class members. The lawsuit seeks $1,000 per violating email.

The NYT did not mention this lawsuit either, even as it was yet another bit of evidence that either Medvi is up to bad shit, or it has a bunch of out of control affiliates potentially breaking laws left and right to increase sales.

And then there are the fake doctors. As Business Insider reported, a review of Meta’s ad library turned up thousands of active ads for Medvi promoted by accounts belonging to doctors who don’t appear to exist. Drug Discovery & Development found over 5,000 active ad campaigns for Medvi on Meta at the time of the NYT piece.

A Drug Discovery & Development review conducted on April 3 of MEDVi’s website, Facebook advertising and public records found a pattern of apparent AI-generated personas, including some presented with medical titles, alongside marketing practices that appeared to go beyond the issues identified so far by regulators. A search of Meta’s Ad Library for “medvi” returned more than 5,000 active ads, many of them running under fabricated physician personas. One Facebook page for “Dr. Robert Whitworth,” which ran sponsored ads for MEDVi’s QUAD erectile dysfunction product, was categorized as an “Entertainment website” and listed an address of “2015 Nutter Street, Cameron, MT, 64429,” a location that does not appear to exist. Other ads ran under names including “Professor Albust Dongledore” and “Dr. Richard Hörzgock,” used AI-generated video testimonials and recycled identical scripts across multiple fabricated personas. In several cases, the page displayed a doctor headshot while the ad itself featured an unrelated person delivering a patient testimonial.

After public scrutiny following the article, those fake doctor accounts started disappearing. In fact, Medvi’s own website fine print acknowledges the practice:

Individuals appearing in advertisements may be actors or AI portraying doctors and are not licensed medical professionals.

Seems like maybe something the NYT should have noticed?

Oh, and that same Drug Discovery and Development article highlights how other snake oil sales sites are using the same named doctors… but with totally different images.

Same names… different people. Drug Discovery and Development has a bit more info about Drs. Carr and Tenbrink:

MEDVi’s current site lists two physicians: Dr. Ana Lisa Carr and Dr. Kelly Tenbrink. Both are licensed doctors who work together at Ringside Health, a concierge practice in Wellington, Florida, that serves the equestrian community. Neither is identified on MEDVi’s site as being affiliated with Ringside Health. On MEDVi’s site, Dr. Tenbrink is listed under “American Board of Emergency Medicine.” Dr. Carr is listed under St. George’s University, School of Medicine, her medical school. The Florida Department of Health practitioner profiles for both physicians state that neither “hold any certifications from specialty boards recognized by the Florida board.” A search of the American Board of Emergency Medicine‘s public directory, which lists 48,863 certified members, returned no current affiliation for Dr. Tenbrink.

Did the NYT do any investigation at all? Serving the equestrian community?

Even the few real doctors Medvi claims to work with turn out to be questionable. From Futurism’s article from last May (again, something the NYT should have maybe checked on?):

We contacted each doctor to ask if they could confirm their involvement with MEDVi and NuHuman. We heard back from one of those medical professionals at the time of publishing, an osteopathic medicine practitioner named Tzvi Doron, who insisted that he had nothing to do with either company and “[needs] to have them remove me from their sites.”

Then there’s what a class action lawsuit filed last November against Medvi’s main partner, OpenLoop Health, alleges about the actual products being sold. The NYT frames OpenLoop as basically making what Gallagher is doing possible, noting that while Gallagher has his AI bots creating marketing copy OpenLoop handles: “doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance.” You know, the actual business.

So it seems kinda notable that way back in November of last year, this lawsuit was filed that claims that the compounded oral tirzepatide tablets — one of Medvi’s key offerings — are essentially pharmacologically inert when delivered as a pill. Tirzepatide (marketed as Zepbound by Eli Lilly) is an FDA approved weight-loss drug as an injectable. But OpenLoop and Medvi have apparently been selling it in pill form. And Eli Lilly says that there are no human studies, let alone clinical trials, involving any tirzepatide pills.

All of that seems like the kind of thing reporters from the NYT should point out.

What we actually have here is a marketing operation that used AI to automate the production of deceptive advertising at a scale and speed that would have been harder to achieve otherwise. Snake oil salesmen have existed forever. What AI gave Matthew Gallagher (and, I guess, his affiliates) was the ability to crank out fake doctors, fabricated testimonials, and deepfaked before-and-after photos faster than any human team could — and to do it cheap enough that a guy with $20,000 and no morals could build it from his house. That’s the actual AI story the Times should have written.

Being good at deceptive marketing while selling weight-loss and erectile dysfunction drugs online has been a thing since the dawn of email spam. The only novelty here is the tools used to do it. The New York Times just wrapped that up in a neat bow and presented it as the proof of Sam Altman’s big promises for AI.

For what it’s worth, Gallagher has been whining about all this on X, per Futurism’s Dupre:

Though Medvi has yet to respond to our questions, the company’s founder, Gallagher, has spent the last few days on X defending his company. He complained in one post — seemingly in reference to criticism — that “the most low t [testosterone] guys” are “the loudest online” and the “Karens of the internet.” In another post, he wrote that it’s “actually a little crazy the number of people who form a whole opinion from a headline and then publicly wish horrible things will happen.”

Ah yes. The guy complaining about “low t guys” and “karens on the internet” for questioning his “AI business” skills, sure is a trustworthy kind of business person that deserves a NYT puff piece.

The real issue now is what the New York Times plans to do about this. A standard correction noting a few missing details won’t cut it. The entire premise of the article — that this company represents the exciting realization of AI’s business potential — is nonsense. Every element of the narrative is tainted: the growth story is built on deceptive marketing, the product claims are contradicted by the FDA and the manufacturers of the actual drugs, the “$1.8 billion” figure is a projection with no valuation to back it up, and the company is currently facing legal action on multiple fronts. The entire article should be retracted.

The NYT says it “was given access to Medvi’s financials to verify its revenue and profits.” Great. They verified that a company engaged in widespread deceptive practices was, in fact, making money from those deceptive practices. Congrats to the NYT for auditing a snake oil salesman and presenting your findings as if he were an upstanding pharmaceutical salesman.

So to my friends and family members wondering why I haven’t built my own billion-dollar AI company: apparently the missing ingredient wasn’t AI — it was being willing to run a deepfake-powered spam operation selling potentially inert pills to desperate people. The AI just made the lying faster. And the New York Times made one guy appear respectable.

MAGA Republicans spent year swaddling themselves in phony “America first!” rhetoric (including suffering an embolism over Chinese influence over TikTok), but have suddenly gone mysteriously quiet now that $24 billion in Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign cash is helping to bankroll right wing billionaire Larry Ellison’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers.

The Wall Street Journal (Reuters non-paywalled alternative) indicates that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has finalized plans to ‌provide ⁠roughly $10 billion to help fund the deal, with another $14 billion split between Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding. China’s Tencent is also expected to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to fund Ellison’s media play.

Because the Trump administration is a corrupt, pay-to-play kakistocracy subservient to the interests of global oligarchs and autocrats, Paramount executives don’t expect any meaningful regulatory review, despite the obvious competition, labor, and foreign influence issues that plague the major deal:

Paramount executives do not expect the funds’ involvement ⁠to trigger ​a review by the Committee ​on Foreign Investment in the U.S. or Federal Communications Commission, the Journal ​said.

The Trump DOJ claims it’s conducting a serious review (and has already sent out some subpoenas), but despite media pretense, there’s absolutely zero reason to assume the DOJ is a credible actor in this arena, especially after the Trump administration purged the handful of even remotely serious antitrust reformers peppered without the ranks of MAGA.

As a result, the only semi-serious obstacle to deal completion is a likely looming lawsuit from a coalition of state attorneys general, who have ample evidence that the deal will result in mass layoffs and higher prices due to the ridiculous $111 billion price tag and broad competitive erosion.

That’s before you even get to the problems with having Middle East countries back the ongoing Republican plan to dominate consolidated corporate media and destroy what’s left of U.S. journalism. Democrats have performatively urged FCC boss Brendan Carr to investigate, but that’s obviously not happening, despite Carr’s history of phony outrage at foreign government meddling.

This has all been a pretty standard road map for autocracies around the world, including Orban’s Hungary. Party-friendly oligarchs buy up all the media, which then gets to work pummeling the public with right wing propaganda while the government strangles independent journalism just out of frame.

It will continue to accelerate here in the States until the public reaches critical mass and our so-called “opposition party” develops an actual, functional backbone and cultivates more ruthless leadership.