I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that this second Trump administration has never shown much concern for the Hatch Act. If you’re not familiar with that particular law, it makes it illegal for most of the members of the executive branch of the federal government, and some state representatives, to engage in partisan political activity. Sometimes the question of whether something violates the Hatch Act can be tricky, or a matter of interpretation.

And sometimes RFK Jr. rides in to provide a nakedly blatant example of a Hatch Act violation. Ron Wyden is calling for an investigation into Kennedy after he reportedly called two different Libertarian candidates in Iowa running for congressional seats to suggest that they drop out. This could be otherwise described as election interference in violation of the Hatch Act.

Wyden cited two instances in which Kennedy may have violated the Hatch Act by encouraging two Libertarian candidates in Iowa to drop out of their respective races.

In a phone call to Libertarian House candidate Marco Battaglia of Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, Kennedy reportedly said, “If this seat flips, it’ll make my life hell.”

In a phone call to Rick Stewart, another Libertarian House candidate running to represent Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, Kennedy reportedly suggested Stewart could find another position within federal government but outside elected office, adding that he would help him accomplish this.

Kennedy is doing this because both races are reportedly quite close and pretty much everyone agrees that the only real impact these Libertarian candidates would have on the election is pulling a few percentage points of the vote away from the Republican candidates. Plainly partisan political influence on an upcoming election, in other words, with something pretty close to bribery to boot when it comes to offering other positions within government in exchange for dropping out.

“Secretary Kennedy called Stewart in his official capacity as a member of the President’s cabinet, and he asked that Stewart suspend his campaign in order to make it easier for the Republican candidate to win the race, easier for the Republican Party to maintain its majority in the House of Representatives, and easier for Kennedy to personally avoid Congressional subpoenas from Democratic committee chairs,” Wyden wrote in his letter to Greer.

“Iowa’s voters should be able to freely choose who represents them in Congress, and our democracy does not allow political appointees to take that power away from them by deleting candidates from the ballot.”

I don’t really know how to argue with any of that. I also don’t have any problem believing that Kennedy has no idea what the Hatch Act is or says, nor that he was violating any laws in making these phone calls. But if the reports are correct, it appears he did. And I also don’t doubt that further reporting will reveal more of Kennedy doing this sort of thing.

That’s the problem with having unprofessional clowns working in your administration.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

Two weeks before this year’s primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud.

“Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted to my office by the Legislature, we will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity,” Paxton said in a February news release announcing the tip line.

The announcement linked to guidance from his office about election laws in Texas, which included a requirement to be a U.S. citizen, a prohibition on collecting mail ballots on behalf of others and a warning that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records or to establish a residence for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election.”

“You must register to vote using the address where you reside,” the attorney general’s guidance stated.

Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving.

It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.

Three election lawyers told the news organizations that Paxton may have violated the same Texas laws his office cautioned about in its news release.

ProPublica and the Tribune reached out to Paxton’s campaign on June 3, 15 and 25, asking why he remained registered to vote in Collin County when he appeared to no longer live there and about his connection to the Denton County property. A reporter also left a voicemail on his personal cellphone on June 25. The news organizations sent his government office and campaign staff an email on Monday with a detailed list of questions, including a request for Paxton’s response to election lawyers’ belief that he may be violating the law. 

Paxton and his office did not reply until Monday’s email. Campaign spokesperson Madison Cercy did not answer the questions from the news organizations. Instead, she issued a statement saying that the attorney general has been “a national leader on election integrity, with a long record of defending Texas elections.” Cercy said that “attempting to insinuate otherwise and tear him down with a baseless, lie-filled tabloid story is not real reporting.”

Asked twice to provide specifics about what they believed was inaccurate, the campaign did not respond. 

Voting in an election when the voter is ineligible is a second-degree felony under Texas law and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. But prosecutors rarely bring cases challenging individual voters’ residency claims because they are hard to prove, the election lawyers said.

State courts have repeatedly ruled that there is no single way to determine where someone lives, and judges must consider multiple factors, such as where a voter sleeps or stores personal belongings. Prosecuting such cases also requires proof that a voter “knowingly” or “intentionally” broke the law.

Even if it’s clear that someone doesn’t live at the address where they are registered to vote, state law allows them to remain registered if their absence is temporary and they intend to return. The provision is commonly used by college students and military service members.

“So long as you truly intend to return, I think you’re fine,” said Beth Stevens, an election lawyer who worked for the Harris County clerk and the Texas Civil Rights Project. “When you start doing things that suggest, ‘Oh, I’ve fully moved. I’m just wink-wink saying I intend to return,’ that’s when you get into questionable territory.”

Paxton’s public and contentious split from his wife could make it difficult to argue that he intended to return to the home they own and where she continues to reside, said David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department.

“I think there would be questions raised about a residence where someone does not live, does not spend the night and can in no way have the intent to continue to reside. Those would probably raise red flags in any state,” Becker said.

Becker, who is now the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to build public trust in elections, added that the situation is particularly problematic because Paxton’s job is to enforce election laws.

“Certainly, the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Texas, someone who has made claims about election integrity and made it a priority of his office, should be charged with knowing the laws of residencies of the state of Texas with regard to voting,” Becker said.

Paxton has advocated for strict enforcement of the state’s election fraud law, including in cases against voters his office alleged had falsified records about where they lived. In 2018, the attorney general’s voter fraud unit arrested nine people on suspicion of using residential addresses where they did not live to vote in a municipal election in Edinburg, in the state’s Rio Grande Valley. County prosecutors, acting on behalf of Paxton, later dismissed the charges after failing to secure a conviction against the mayoral candidate they alleged had encouraged those voters to register at false addresses. The candidate, Richard Molina, said he was innocent and said the prosecution was politically motivated.

Clark Birdsall was not the attorney on those cases but defended another resident whom Paxton prosecuted for illegal voting. Birdsall was stunned that the attorney general appears to have voted under an address where he does not live.

He called it “especially egregious that someone such as Ken Paxton appears he’s not conforming to the law.”

State privacy laws allow some politicians and law enforcement officials to shield their voter registration information from public view. Paxton does not do so. His opponent in the Senate race, Democratic State Rep. James Talarico, does. Talarico’s campaign said he lives and is registered at the north Austin home he purchased in 2022. ProPublica and the Tribune were not able to independently confirm this.

Paxton’s campaign did not raise any issues with Talarico’s voter registration. In her statement to ProPublica and the Tribune, however, Cercy said, “Talarico has actively campaigned against voter security measures” and has said he opposes voter identification requirements. She pointed to a 2021 Fox News interview in which the state representative said he opposed voter identification rules that would require Texans to provide their driver’s license number or partial Social Security number for mail ballots. Talarico said hundreds of thousands of Texans, who don’t drive, lack a driver’s license. He did not directly answer a question about Social Security numbers during the interview.

The Talarico campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

Paxton’s living arrangements since he separated from his wife are not public, but information obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune offers some indication of where he may have been residing since February.

In mid-February, a trust bought a 5,000-square-foot home listed for $2.4 million in a gated community in Denton County, according to the appraisal district and the seller’s real estate agent. The trust did not disclose its ownership to Denton County officials. Trusts are not required to by law, a spokesperson for Travis County’s appraisal district said.

Paxton shares a separate blind trust with his wife, Angela, that they have used to purchase property and other assets. For years, the address listed for that blind trust had been an office building in Collin County. But that address was changed to the Denton County home a week after the property was purchased.

Angela Paxton said through a spokesperson that she has no connection to the Denton County home or the trust that purchased it. The trustee of the Paxtons’ trust, family friend Chip Loper, did not respond to questions about the address change.

In June, a reporter knocked on the door of the Denton County home. No one answered. When the reporter placed a letter for Paxton in the mailbox, an envelope addressed to Warren Paxton, the attorney general’s given name, was visible.

Later that week, Paxton appeared on a podcast with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Video from the podcast showed Paxton seated in front of a fireplace and mantle that were nearly identical to those depicted in the home’s online real estate listing. One resident also told the newsrooms that they spotted Paxton in the gated community.

Separately, the Daily Mail reported in May that Paxton had moved into the Denton County home with Tracy Duhon, whose extramarital affair with Paxton, the news outlet said, prompted his wife’s divorce filing. The Daily Mail also published a video of Paxton and Duhon that it reported was taken at an airport in Iceland in late June. The video was quickly seized upon by Talarico, who depicted Paxton as out of touch with Texans. Duhon did not respond to questions about her connection to the Denton County property or about the Daily Mail reporting.

Paxton is not registered to vote in Denton County, voter rolls show. Instead, since February, he has voted in Collin County twice: once in the March Republican primary and once in the May runoff. Each Texas county elects its own slate of local officials, which is why state law requires voters to register where they live.

Ekow Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan whose expertise includes election law, said Paxton’s voter registration situation should remind the attorney general of what studies have consistently shown: that intentional illegal voting is rare.

“You would think that somebody who’s going through this would learn a little bit of humility that lots of things which look on their face, like technical violations of the law, are usually explained by totally ordinary things,” Yankah said. “It’s only if you’re utterly cynical and ignore all the evidence that you make a claim that, in fact, these cases are attributable to nefarious criminal intent.”

Paxton cannot claim ignorance of the law because he enforces it, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, as attorney general, Paxton should avoid even the appearance that he is not following the law, Blank said.

“We expect these laws to be understandable by ordinary citizens,” Blank said. “When our elected officials who are tasked with passing and enforcing these laws exhibit troubles in engaging with the voting process themselves, that raises serious questions.”

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by Niklas Eder, co-founder and co-CEO of User Rights, a designated out of court dispute settlement body under the Digital Services Act which reviews complaints from users whose social media posts have been deleted or moderated. Together, Ben and Niklas discuss:

• UK to lay out social media curbs for 16 and 17 year-olds (POLITICO)
• ‘What’s the point?’ Teenagers give their verdict on Britain’s social media curfew (The Guardian)
• EU moves towards social media ban for children (Financial Times)
• They Helped Women Fight Online Abuse. They Were Barred From the U.S. (The New York Times)
• Discord confirms AI moderators have banned thousands over harmless images (Mashable)
• Federal Court Suspends Trump Immigration Policy Targeting Technology Researchers (Knight First Amendment Institute)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

• EU threatens Meta with fines over ‘addictive’ Facebook and Instagram (BBC News)
• Commission preliminarily finds the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook in breach of the Digital Services Act (European Commission)
• The Question of Legality and the Function of the Commission’s Preliminary Findings Against Meta (Verfassungsblog)

Our fun links this week are a lawn mowing game for post-World Cup stress relief and the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers because we need more satire right now. 

This episode is sponsored by PwC, whose upcoming 2026 Trust and Safety Outlook Report explores the forces reshaping how organizations are approaching online safety and integrity. In our special bonus chat, Ben sits down with Dan Hays, Principal Partner of Strategy& (part of the PwC network), to talk about the future of trust and safety and get a sneak peek at some of the themes in their report before its release next week at TrustCon.

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

JK Rowling has spoken about how she wrote the first Harry Potter book while she was employed at Amnesty International and how much that experience influenced her writing, and how she learned “the power of human empathy” from working there. Rowling was also, you’ll recall, one of the high profile signers of the infamous Harper’s Letter on “open debate.”

Now she’s threatening to bankrupt Amnesty International for expressing an opinion about Beira’s Place, a “women only” charity Rowling created.

Amnesty International UK had released a report, expressing its well-supported opinion about so-called “anti-rights actors,” specifically calling out a number of groups that it believed, through their statements or actions, sought to “restrict human rights by undermining human rights protections in law and practice.” It had a section on “anti-gender” efforts by some groups which have targeted trans rights and pointed out that:

“Human rights are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. When the rights of one group are restricted, protections for others can also be weakened, even where the effects are not immediately visible.”

This should be a fairly non-controversial statement. But, the report named a number of organizations that it deemed to be “gender critical,” which are, in effect, organizations that have — through their words or actions — done damage to trans rights in particular, and the wider LGBTQ+ space.

No matter your stance on any of this, expressing an opinion about an organization should be seen as part of their free speech and… what’s the term Rowling used in the Harper’s letter? Right, “open debate.”

But, no, not here. One of the organizations that Amnesty mentioned was Beira’s Place, which Rowling helped create as an organization to provide support for female victims of sexual violence. However, aligned with Rowling’s transphobic views and campaigning, the organization proudly insists that it is for “women only.” Beira’s Place and the constant verbiage surrounding it about being for “women only” have certainly contributed to the sense that it is another part of Rowling’s transphobic mission to diminish and deny rights of transgender women.

To look at Rowling’s X feed, for example, is to witness a near never-ending stream of gleefully obnoxious and petty attacks on trans people who speak up for their own rights. I’d post examples, but I’d rather not give any more attention to that sort of hateful messaging.

Thus it’s entirely reasonable to have and express the opinion that Beira’s Place and other operations that refuse to recognize the rights of trans women (and trans men) are “anti-rights.” I mean, literally part of Beira’s Place’s messaging to the world has been its anti-trans stance.

After all, as the statement above notes, when you deny rights to one group, you are weakening rights for all. And, look, even if you somehow agree with Rowling, if you actually believed in free speech and “open debate” you should at least support Amnesty UK in expressing their opinion that being anti-trans is being anti-rights.

But Rowling seems to absolutely loathe any actual “open debate” regarding her views towards the trans community. Thus, she spoke out angrily about the Amnesty report, leading to a media fury, and causing the organization to pull it down. She has also demanded an apology and threatened to sue the organization:

Lawyers acting for the centre have threatened Amnesty with court action unless it permanently withdraws the report, publicly apologises to the blacklisted groups and commissions an external investigation into how it came to be published.

The letter said: “The [Amnesty] report has wrongly labelled all associated with Beira’s Place, including those accessing support as anti-rights bigots who are seeking to weaken human rights.

“This is a shocking way to describe those who are seeking help to overcome the trauma of sexual violence. There is no basis for these allegations, and our client, with the support of its founder JK Rowling, will not sit back and allow the reputation of Beira’s Place or those who access its support to be tarnished in this way.”

And to make it clear she seeks to burden Amnesty UK with as many costly lawsuits as possible, she’s offering to fund other organizations that wish to sue Amnesty International UK over this report.

That’s her tweeting:

Should any of the women’s organisations targeted by Amnesty UK’s recent ‘anti-rights’ blacklist wish to take legal action, applications can be made to the JK Rowling Women’s Fund.

So much for free speech and open debate, huh?

Rowling has a right to express her own bigotry and hateful views. But Amnesty International and anyone else should also be able to express their opinion that by her words and her deeds she is doing real harm to the rights of trans people worldwide. But Rowling is making every effort to shut that down.

I am sure that Rowling and her supporters will claim, ridiculously, that because she views Beira’s Place and her other anti-trans activism as “pro-women’s rights” that it is somehow defamatory to call it anti-rights. But that’s why it’s a protected opinion. Whether or not one’s views and actions are pro or anti-rights is, inherently, an opinion.

My opinion is that Rowling is a hateful, angry woman who has done tremendous harm to some of the most marginalized people in the world for no reason at all, and her wink wink nod nod “I’m just supporting women’s rights” bullshit as cover for that is both craven and pathetic. She has contributed to a hateful, anti-rights movement that has put millions of people at greater risk. That she is now seeking to effectively silence and potentially destroy the organization that she, herself, claims was so valuable in getting her to understand the value of human empathy is a particularly sad statement on where her life has taken her.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for literally any of her Harper’s Letter co-signers to call out her attacks on the organization’s speech, and threats to their existence for expressing an opinion she doesn’t like. Apparently, that kind of “open debate” is too much?

Simplify your daily charging experience and replace most of the chargers and cables on your desktop, with this one mini station that does it all. The 6-in-1 Magstand Mini Magnetic Charge Station is a mini charging station that gives you full control over how much your favorite gadgets get charged. It features 3 wireless charging spots, and one USB-A port, and can also double as a bedside lamp with 2 brightness levels. It has 3 sets of magnets to ensure stability on any surface, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, and others. It’s on sale for $45.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

You might have heard that Donald Trump gave a weird, rambling, nonsense speech last night full of misinformation and lies, trying to spread distrust in our electoral process ahead of the 2026 midterms — so that when Republicans likely lose some of the power they currently wield across the government, Trump and his allies can pretend it was due to faulty elections. The President of the United States is literally undermining trust in elections, which is both dangerous and incredibly stupid.

At a fundamental level, none of it makes sense. He’s focused on the 2020 election, when HE was in charge of the government. Assuming that there really was a huge foreign effort then, wouldn’t it have also worked in 2024 when Trump won, but Biden was president?

But, more to the point, the newly declassified documents that the White House released, not only fail to support the rambling claims he made last night, but they actually show (pretty clearly) that China (who he blamed for foreign interference) not only deliberately chose not to engage in nefarious attacks on the US elections, but rather that the Russians, who have long supported Trump, did do so.

Let’s go through a few of the docs to show what they say.

The big one is the National Intelligence Council Assessment from 2020 (again, when Donald Trump was president). While (conveniently!) much of the Russia section is redacted, reading what’s in the document it says that Putin intended to support Trump and harm Biden:

But at the same time, it notes that while China probably preferred Biden over Trump, it was not making any real effort to impact the election beyond just spreading general anti-US messaging.

Multiple times throughout the documents, the Intelligence Community notes that while China might have the tools to exert influence over elections, it recognizes that attempts to do so would likely be exposed and lead to backlash, and thus sees little reason to take proactive measures against election infrastructure. See below, where they note that any such effort could backfire on Beijing.

There was a separate document (elsewhere described as the “minority view”) regarding China’s intent to mess with the US election, which disagrees with the majority view — but only at the margins. It notes, instead, that it believes “Beijing has taken at least some low-level, exploratory steps to undermine the president’s reelection chances…” but then later admits these steps were pretty minimal, and says that “these efforts probably have not included the use of Beijing’s most aggressive options… because Beijing wants to minimize the risk of blowback and hopes to stabilize the relationship after the election.”

Again, I feel the need to remind you, that these are the documents that the Trump administration just released to claim that China did a major hack of the 2020 elections. But the things THEY released literally say the opposite.

And while the fuller discussion of Russian attacks is redacted, it does include a few tidbits… including the fact that Russian operatives tried to spread false rumors about Joe Biden and Ukraine in the leadup to the 2020 election… and that they focused on convincing people in Donald Trump’s White House of these false claims.

On top of that this new release includes a super handy chart comparing efforts by Russia, China, and Iran — one that shows only Russia (not China) sought to manipulate the actual election process by “targeting, accessing, or manipulating election processes or election-related systems.” For China, it notes that while the country took preliminary steps, it did not observe any actual attack on our election system. But they did see it with Russia.

Can’t wait to hear again about how “Russiagate” was a hoax, when the documents that Trump himself released show pretty clearly that Russia was observed by Trump’s intelligence community attempting to manipulate the election in favor of Trump. China (whom Trump misleadingly blamed for manipulating the 2020 election) is shown in these documents not to have done anything more than “preliminary” explorations, but even the most hawkish view on China was that they didn’t want to do anything more aggressive for fear of eventual blowback.

So, uh, yeah.

Look, we all know what this was really about. Trump and his MAGA toadies know that the outlook for the 2026 midterms looks bad for the GOP. Really bad. Rather than, I dunno, figuring out why he has the lowest approval ratings of a president in ages, Trump refuses to accept the fact that he’s been one of America’s worst, most destructive, most corrupt presidents ever, and has decided to just cast doubt on the next election.

Indeed, as Tom Nichols writes, Trump’s speech last night clearly did way more damage to American elections than anything China sought to do.

The specifics don’t matter to MAGA cultists. They’ll be out there (and probably in our comments) ignoring what these documents actually say. They’ll repeat the false claims. They will claim any Democrat elected was elected via fraud. But the documents say what they say (even if the juicier bits about Russia are redacted). And they say Putin wanted Trump to win and took all sorts of efforts to help him out, including targeting our election systems. China lightly favored Biden, and while it may have taken exploratory steps, it realized that anything more serious would almost certainly blow up in its face — and chose not to interfere.

I know we live in an era where it often feels that facts don’t matter, but these are the facts. And the fact that they come from Donald Trump’s own declassification of documents that he pretends say the exact opposite of what they say is the kind of thing that I hope people remember on election day.

Here’s a short crash course in U.S. telecom policy.

Giant and very unpopular companies like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter created regional monopolies that work tirelessly to erode all meaningful competition and oversight, resulting in high prices, spotty service, slower speeds, and abysmal customer service. They also pay a bunch of dodgy pseudo-academic “free market” think tanks to insist this is all very innovative and exciting.

Every so often a few Democrats (the handful not too timid to stand up to the telecom lobby) propose the absolute bare minimum policy “solution” that usually involves nibbling around the edges of the actual problem (unchecked monopoly power coddled by corruption). These efforts are very often highly decorative and performative, and very rarely competently enforced.

Enter Republicans, who work seamlessly with the telecom lobby to destroy even these bare-bones proposals, framing them as radical. The result: no real oversight of telecom giants, who then double down on all of their worst behaviors.

This just happens again and again and again in U.S. policy (privacy, net neutrality, predatory business practices). And will keep happening until the U.S. addresses its corruption problems. Which, with a minimum 2.5 years of Trumpism left, doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.

The latest case in point: back during the Biden era, the FCC under Jessica Rosenworcel proposed a new “nutrition label for broadband” that required ISPs break down each individual fee and restriction on your bill. Note it didn’t actually stop ISPs from ripping you off, it just created a mostly voluntary system whereby ISPs were politely asked to list the real price of service, including usage caps and bullshit fees.

Studies found that unsurprisingly, most ISPs didn’t comply and the FCC, even under Biden, didn’t really enforce the rules.

Despite this being, once again, a bare minimum policy effort that didn’t even actually fix the underlying problem and was never meaningfully enforced, the telecom lobby very much didn’t like the idea of having to be transparent. Or the government telling them what to do. So they’ve lobbied the Trump administration to dismantle the requirements:

“The Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate a rule that requires Internet service providers to list all of their so-called “passthrough” fees on an easily accessible broadband price label. The FCC vote could also make the price labels themselves a bit harder for consumers to find.”

Great stuff. Very populist. Who wasn’t begging the government to make it easier for big shitty companies to rip you off with bullshit surcharges and fees?

Keep in mind it took the U.S. government thirty-five years of telecom monopoly predation to finally come up with the idea “maybe we politely ask giant telecom monopolies to be semi-honest about their price.” But even that was a bridge too far for a corrupt U.S. federal government.

It should be noted that this most recent “nutrition label” approach was technically required by Congress, which was trying to ensure that the $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies in the infrastructure bill resulted in semi-decent broadband. But as I’ve been exploring, the Trump administration has hijacked that program to slather Elon Musk with subsidies, stripping all meaningful oversight in the process.

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr’s order rolling back the rules tries to pretend they’re doing this for the sake of consumer clarity:

“However, the Commission’s initial rules, adopted in 2022, resulted in sometimes confusing labels that strayed beyond the statutory framework Congress created, increasing compliance costs for providers in the process. With this order, we refocus the rules on ensuring that consumers have the clear, accurate, and concise information about broadband plans that they want, making the labels a more useful shopping tool.”

That is a blatant lie. Carr is simply folding like a weakling to the demands of Comcast, AT&T and friends. There is no consumer benefit to making broadband pricing less transparent. It simply works to further obscure the real problem: regional monopoly predation, coddled by captured regulators like Carr. Comcast didn’t like having to be even semi-honest about precisely how it rips you off.

To try and avoid making it clear he’s breaking the law and ignoring Congress, Carr is pretending the labels will technically still exist. They will, of course, feature fewer requirements, be harder to find, and there will be absolutely no enforcement should ISPs balk at the rules.

Carr has more important things to do, like dismantling the First Amendment because a comedian made fun of the president’s wife, or eliminating bare-bones regulations to make life even easier on shitty robocallers, prison phone monopolies, and telecom giants.

The United States is not a serious country. It’s too corrupt to function in the public interest. And it’s become a strange combination of painful, boring, and pathetic that we have journalists, policymakers, think tankers, and regulators too feckless or captured to be honest about any of it.

There’s a lot of health news going on in the country right now, in no small part to the absolutely pitiful and pathetic job RFK Jr. is doing heading up HHS. It is a near certainty that by the end of this week, the CDC will have published an updated case count for measles that is greater than last year’s total case count, which was itself the largest since the 90s. Pertussis is also surging. There’s that new outbreak going around where you apparently just shit your pants constantly, like some kind of minor South Park character or something.

And so it was something of a breath of fresh air when the Trump administration nominated Erica Schwartz to lead the CDC, all because she appeared to be well qualified for the role and hadn’t said anything crazy-pants about things like vaccines. That this has become the standard for a feel-good HHS story is telling, but it was welcome news all the same.

Commenting on the nomination, Kennedy said he wouldn’t commit to taking CDC advice on vaccines, nor would he commit to not directly interfering with CDC operations and policy making.

Kennedy’s response Tuesday suggested Schwartz could face an equally short tenure. His answer came amid an exchange with Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) in a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Ruiz asked Kennedy: “If Dr. Schwartz is confirmed, will you commit on the record today to implement whatever vaccine guidance she issues without interference?”

Kennedy replied without hesitation: “I’m not going to make that kind of commitment.”

Which is part of what informed senators to ask Schwartz about resisting Kennedy’s fuckery in her confirmation hearings. Sadly, it appears that Schwartz refused to demonstrate that she in fact has a backbone.

[D]uring a hearing sometimes marked by heated exchanges, Dr. Erica Schwartz repeatedly declined to say whether she would resist political pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy.

Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy, R-La., repeatedly questioned Schwartz about whether she would have authority to make personnel and policy decisions without political interference from the Health and Human Services Department. Schwartz did not directly answer whether she could hire and dismiss CDC employees independently or whether she would refuse directives from Kennedy that conflicted with scientific evidence.

Asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., whether she would carry out an order to discontinue a public campaign encouraging influenza vaccination, Schwartz replied, “I don’t speak in hypotheticals.”

And so, once again, the country will get to wonder whether the CDC really does have an actual director, or just some figurehead placed there to give Kennedy’s insanity the veneer of consensus. This is a very real problem given our current context and, frankly, these questions should not be terribly difficult to answer. For someone with integrity, at least, the answer should be something like, “As CDC’s Director, it would be my responsibility to refuse any order that would make the country less healthy, no matter who it comes from. And as CDC Director, I would have that authority by the nature of the position.”

All of that being said, Schwartz did at least reaffirm her sanity on the topic of vaccines.

Ranking Member Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked Schwartz if she would remove a webpage updated last November on the CDC’s website on autism and vaccines. The webpage states that a link between the two has been ignored despite many studies finding no such link.

Schwartz said she accepted there is “overwhelming evidence” vaccines don’t cause autism, but did not commit to removing the webpage.

“Senator, I have been in situations where I have had to go to my superiors in the military to have conversations, very difficult conversations, about things that may have been concerning to the troops or to the military personnel, and I will do the same with [Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.],” she replied.

Once again, great that she is sane when it comes to vaccines, less great that she won’t commit to actually doing the right thing and removing the nonsense from CDC’s website.

I’m still relatively optimistic about Schwartz leading CDC. It may be that she didn’t want to publicly embarrass what would be her new boss if confirmed. It may be that she ends up pushing back hard on Kennedy’s attempts at interfering with her agency if confirmed, which will probably end up with her being fired. Even that would be fine by me, since it would be one more glaring data point of chaos at HHS under Kennedy.

If that led to Kennedy’s firing, it would be worth it.

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

The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.

The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.

Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.

Five months earlier, Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty cast a decisive vote approving Paramount’s historic $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Now, the commissioner and a guest enjoyed the star-studded celebration thanks to tickets gifted to her by Paramount worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.

The other commissioner who approved the merger watched from a prized perch. FCC Chair Brendan Carr and his wife sat in a private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

It’s unclear if Paramount gifted Carr the premium seats because the FCC has yet to make public his financial disclosure for last year.

However, past disclosures show Carr and Trusty are among seven FCC commissioners who have accepted Kennedy gala tickets from CBS or its parent company over the last decade. Ethics experts told ProPublica this poses a blatant conflict of interest since the commission regulates the network. Carr’s previous financial statements show he has accepted tickets at least seven times since his 2017 appointment, totaling over $63,000 in gifts.

Last December’s ceremony attended by Trusty and Carr took place as Paramount was launching a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval.

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the premium tickets Trusty and Carr compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on the merger.

“There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect,” said Walter Shaub, who led the federal Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. “The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What’s at stake is nothing less than the public’s trust in government.”

Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department, and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said the commissioners who accepted tickets cannot participate in this matter without damaging the integrity of the government’s decision-making process.

“This is shocking. Pretty disturbing, that’s what I would say. I just don’t understand what they were thinking,” said Canter, who now works as chief counsel for ethics and corruption at the nonpartisan government watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund.

The FCC’s review of the merger is one of the final hurdles facing a historic $110 billion consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks, and digital platforms.

The new megacorporation, which could reshape how millions will access news, movies, sports and video games, faces fierce opposition from inside and outside Hollywood. More than 5,000 actors, producers and entertainment workers — including stars such as Robert De Niro, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix and Glenn Close — signed an open letter decrying how the consolidation would eliminate jobs and compromise “the integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry.”

On Monday, California, New York and 10 other Democratic states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state anti-monopoly laws.

American and international regulators are evaluating the deal for its potential national security implications and impacts to consumers worldwide. Last week, the British government signaled it planned to investigate whether the new entertainment titan that would emerge from the union would unfairly stifle competition. The FCC’s ongoing review includes examining the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds backing the deal, including from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

The FCC usually has five commissioners — all appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve five-year terms — but the agency currently has only three. Any vote by the full commission would likely be decided by Republicans Carr and Trusty over Democrat Anna Gomez. Gomez was not at the December 2025 show but has accepted tickets from Paramount in the past. Because the FCC requires a three-commissioner quorum for a vote, any recusal could leave the panel unable to decide on the merger. Carr could decide to ask staff to approve the deal rather than bring it to a commission vote, but the ethics experts said he should recuse himself from any decisions affecting the Paramount merger.

The experts warned the commissioners’ gifts might become central in legal challenges and said the Justice Department should investigate potential violations of federal rules or laws.

Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Gomez said in a statement that she followed agency advice when she attended the event in 2023 and 2024. Her statement did not elaborate or otherwise address why taking gifts from Paramount did not pose a conflict of interest.

An FCC spokesperson said agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioner appearances, finding it consistent with ethics law.

“FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration,” the FCC said in a statement. “There has been no change in recent years.”

Shaub called the justification outrageous.

“It’s no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time,” Shaub said. “That kind of explanation doesn’t work for school children, and it sure as hell doesn’t work for government officials who are supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader.”

Despite their oversight role, FCC members have long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.

Carr’s predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, who was appointed FCC chair by President Joe Biden and stepped down in January 2025, attended regularly.

Rosenworcel and several other former commissioners who accepted the tickets did not respond to requests for comment. The one commissioner who didn’t accept a single gift, Nathan Simington, said he received the Kennedy Center invites from CBS and Paramount but turned them down because it “wasn’t my cup of tea.”

A review of 10 years of disclosures shows commissioners accepted paid trips from various sponsors to appear at banquets and speak at conferences. Some of those gifts came from other media companies regulated by the FCC. NBCUniversal, ABC-Disney and Fox News, for instance, paid for commissioners to attend White House Correspondents’ Association dinners, records show. The total value of the combined gifts topped $308,000. But the vast majority came from CBS and its parent company.

Melissa Zukerman, Paramount’s chief communications officer, said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. She didn’t address why the practice continued after new ownership took over last year, the purpose of the gifts or whether the tickets posed a conflict of interest.

Carr, who joined the FCC as a staffer in 2012 and rose to become the agency’s general counsel, was appointed to serve as a commissioner by Trump during his first term. Since then, Carr has accepted tickets annually, except when the 2020 event was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to his public disclosures.

Carr did not respond to an email request from ProPublica for his latest ethics report, which would indicate whether Paramount also paid for him to attend last December’s gala. The FCC referred us to the Office of Government Ethics, which told us that the FCC had not yet provided the disclosure. The FCC did not respond to our subsequent requests for the record.

A 2009 Office of Government Ethics memo gave federal employees the right to attend Kennedy Center events but explicitly said officials cannot accept free attendance “offered by persons other than the Kennedy Center and its trustees, officers and employees.” In 2016, the ethics office tightened its gift requirements, warning officials to avoid any appearance “of loss of impartiality.”

There is an exemption to the gift rules that allows free entry to gatherings that are widely attended and paid for by third parties, but only if certain conditions are met.

The event must “further agency programs or operations,” and the agency’s interest in an official attending must outweigh “concern that the employee may be, or may appear to be, improperly influenced in the performance of official duties,” according to the federal rules.

As an example, the Office of Government Ethics said an industry-wide seminar attended by more than 100 people could be allowed if the employee’s participation would be in the agency’s interest. But those attending should “represent a range of persons interested in a given matter” and the event must provide a “structured opportunity” to exchange ideas and views among invitees.

The office clarified in a 2007 memo that performing arts presentations would not count even if they, like the honors gala, have a reception before or afterward at which officials can mingle with other attendees.

Canter, the former White House ethics lawyer, said it would be a “stretch” for the FCC to argue the exemptions apply to the Kennedy Center’s annual show, where famous musicians perform and celebrities laud those who are being honored. “It’s not what we would consider a widely attended gathering,” she said.

Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, noted that federal rules also require agencies to weigh the market value of the attendance, its relevance to the agency, any sensitive pending matters involving the donor and whether accepting free tickets creates an appearance of preferential treatment.

“The ethics rules are designed to prevent this exact situation,” he said, adding that it is an “obvious conflict of interest” for an official to “accept expensive gifts from anyone with decisions pending before the agency. This matters because it makes the public question whether official decisions are free from the improper influence of wealthy special interests.”

An FCC official familiar with the legal guidance given to the commissioners said they were told the event met the criteria for the “widely attended gathering” exception. (The source was not authorized to talk publicly about agency legal discussions.)

Shaub, the former Office of Government Ethics head, disagreed, saying it would be “hard to understand what compelling interest the FCC could think it had in letting its commissioners” attend the gala.

“What possible reason could have outweighed the obvious ethics concerns?” he asked.

Federal rules require written authorization for an official to accept free entry to a widely attended gathering. The FCC did not respond to our requests to provide the authorizations for the Paramount tickets or say who authorized them. Two senior ethics officials at the agency, Kathleen Fulp and Lauren Northrop, did not respond to requests for comment.

While December’s event came at a particularly sensitive time for Paramount and the FCC, it wasn’t the first.

More than a year earlier, in September 2024, Paramount had filed paperwork seeking the commission’s approval for its merger with Skydance Media. A month later, the FCC launched an investigation of CBS after a conservative group complained about a “60 Minutes” interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Trump later filed a lawsuit alleging the network deceptively edited the interview — an accusation CBS denied.

Then in November, less than two weeks after his election victory, Trump declared he would appoint Carr as FCC chair. Almost immediately, Carr accused CBS of biased election coverage and said it would be an obstacle to approving the Paramount-Skydance merger.

That December, Carr and three other commissioners — Rosenworcel, Gomez and Geoffrey Starks — accepted Kennedy Center gala tickets from Paramount worth a combined $48,156.

On Jan. 16, 2025, just days before Rosenworcel stepped down from the commission, she announced the agency was dismissing the election complaint against CBS. She and Gomez called the outcome a victory for the First Amendment.

But days later, Carr, the incoming FCC chair, reopened the investigation.

To resolve Trump’s lawsuit, CBS agreed to pay the president $16 million, a decision criticized by legal experts who decried Trump’s claims as baseless.

Two days after Trump posted on social media that he had received the settlement money, the FCC took up the Paramount-Skydance merger. To meet Carr’s demands, Paramount agreed to appoint an independent ombudsperson who would evaluate claims of bias. The company also pledged to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

By then, Starks and Simington had unexpectedly stepped down from the commission. Trusty, a Trump appointee, had been confirmed by the Senate the previous month.

Trusty and Carr voted in favor of the merger. Gomez voted against, blasting the approval for requiring “never-before-seen forms of government control over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment.”

Experts said that while Trusty had no conflict yet, Carr and Gomez did. The fact that Gomez voted against Paramount did not mean she didn’t face a conflict under the rules, Shaub said.

Federal rules only require those who accept improper gifts to make a prompt reimbursement, but Shaub and the other experts said Carr and Gomez should have abstained from the vote.

“If you repay the face value of the ticket, the gift rules don’t require you to recuse — though common sense and any kind of conscience might lead you to recuse voluntarily for the good of the country,” Shaub said. “But if you refuse to repay the donor, I don’t see how anything short of recusal could remotely remediate the problem.”

With the Paramount-Skydance merger greenlit by the FCC, Ellison, the new company’s CEO, then set his sights on acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery.

Warner at first rebuffed Paramount’s overtures and on Dec. 5 — two days before the Kennedy Center gala — accepted a bid from Netflix to buy its studio and streaming assets. Ellison responded by making numerous calls to administration officials and had a long talk with Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal.

On the night of the gala, Trump told reporters the Netflix deal “could be a problem” and that he planned to get directly involved with the regulatory approval. Inside the Kennedy Center, Carr and his wife sat with Ellison in an exclusive skybox, Bloomberg reported. (Gomez said in her statement to ProPublica that she declined Paramount’s “invitation because of serious concerns about press independence connected to conditions Paramount agreed to as part of its merger transaction before the FCC.”)

Hours after the gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery.

About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed Paramount over Netflix on CNBC, promising swift approval.

If one or more commissioners choose to abstain from a merger vote because of ethical concerns, what would happen next is unclear. Under federal conflict of interest rules, an agency designee could theoretically permit commissioners to vote after considering several factors, including “the difficulty of reassigning the matter,” the nature of the relationship between the commissioners and Paramount, and the “effect that resolution of the matter would have upon the financial interests” of the firm.

Carr could bypass a full commission vote entirely, as he did with the recent acquisition of Tegna by Nexstar Media Group. In that case, Carr delegated authority to FCC staff to approve the takeover.

But any decision on the Paramount deal — whether by the full commission or by staff at the direction of the chair — is likely to be challenged.

Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney in the administration of George W. Bush, said while courts often defer to the government’s judgment, they also can become skeptical if a regulatory agency is shown to have violated ethics rules.

“A judge may very well say that the merger decision of the FCC isn’t worth jack because the process was corrupted,” he said.

This is probably nothing more than another data point in a deluge, but it’s worth pointing out because it’s instructive.

Cops are using a whole lot of surveillance tech these days. Flock Safety has been especially aggressive in pursuing the law enforcement market, offering cops access to a nationwide network of cameras, including many owned and operated by private citizens.

Flock — and its law enforcement partners — have generated a lot of negative press over the last couple of years. Some of this is due to cops abusing their access and/or performing searches for federal agencies that aren’t allowed to directly access Flock’s database. Some of this is due to Flock itself, which has seen the negative press and largely chosen to ignore it.

But now Flock has real problems. Federal legislators are demanding answers to uncomfortable questions. And dozens of cities are attempting to rid themselves of Flock cameras following public outcry and/or evidence of abuse by those with access.

In San Francisco, it’s a blend of both. And the answers/excuses made by Flock and the SFPD make it clear law enforcement agencies cannot be trusted with the tech they now have easy access to.

“During a routine compliance audit in May, SFPD officials found that the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) had queried SFPD’s Flock network on behalf of federal and out-of-state agencies. There were 299 improper inquiries over approximately one year, which accounts for 0.005% of inquiries over that period,” the release states.

Each of these searches performed on behalf of federal agencies broke state law. To its credit, the SFPD pulled the plug on access following the results of this audit. And while that’s the sort of response we’d like to see from more law enforcement agencies, the statements issued by those involved (SFPD, Flock) make it clear the only way to prevent abuse is to never allow cops to have access to this tech in the first place.

Here’s what Flock Safety had to say about the audit results:

A Flock spokesperson in February said the company had disabled its national lookup feature for all California agencies and is confident its privacy protections comply with state law, local policy and community expectations.

[…]

In response to the San Francisco audit, Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel told KTVU that the searches were not a result of a software malfunction, platform issue, unauthorized access, or any failure of the Flock system.

Without more information, it’s impossible to tell whether the first statement issued by Flock (in response to a lawsuit) is true. It could be that feds asked the SFPD to perform local searches, which would lend credence to Flock’s initial statement. The fact that 299 potentially illegal searches took place over the last year doesn’t generate a whole lot of confidence in either the supply or demand side of the Flock equation.

The second statement makes things a bit more clear: this wasn’t SFPD officers going outside of any limitations imposed by Flock or the department itself. Instead, they broke the law by running searches they most likely knew violated state regulations. In other words, this wasn’t Flock enabling lawlessness. This was cops working within the system to violate the law.

The implication gets even stronger now that the SFPD has issued its own statement. This appears to have been officers breaking the law, rather than the law being (accidentally or otherwise) bypassed because the software wasn’t configured correctly.

The San Francisco Police Department identified the activity through a routine audit of its own Flock network and took immediate action, Lewbel noted. 

He added that no out-of-state or federal agencies had direct access to SFPD’s Flock system or any California Flock system. 

The first sentence means something. The second sentence, however, is meaningless. The limitations placed on access by Flock and SFPD policies were circumvented to perform exactly the sort of searches they were meant to prevent. This audit could have come back completely clean if SFPD officers hadn’t decided to break the rules.

And even if 299 illegal searches are only “0.005%” of the total number of searches, that doesn’t mean the other 99.995% of searches were justified. Most people assume ALPR databases are only accessed when a license plate generates a hit due to prior placement on a watch list. That’s an false impression that’s been perpetrated for years by law enforcement, which constantly claims these are used to track down car thieves, kidnappers, bank robbers, and other dangerous criminals.

But when audits are only looking for searches that route around parameters, they don’t see all the searches being made by cops who are bored or are tracking their exes or trying to hunt down women who are doing nothing more than seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies. The “0.005% of searches” assertion is likely misleading as well. Plaintiffs suing the state over its ALPR use alleged more than 1.6 million illegal searches during the same time period across the state. Not only that, but the number of total searches is likely inflated by those triggered by the system itself, which involve minimal interaction by officers utilizing the ALPR network.

On one hand, if we decide Flock is actually telling the truth this time, the blame lies with the officers who choose to break the rules and the law. On the other hand, if Flock’s representation of the facts is inaccurate, it only means cops who knew what the law was chose to break it simply because they easily could. Neither of these scenarios add up to the SFPD being trustworthy. And splitting the difference just means we can’t trust the SFPD’s camera provider either.

A few weeks ago, David Lat went on the Serious Trouble podcast and mentioned that things actually hadn’t turned out that poorly for the craven big law firms that had caved to Donald Trump’s ridiculous attacks on any law firm he didn’t like. The law firms that fought back keep winning in court, as it’s obviously ridiculous and unconstitutional to punish law firms because you don’t like the clients they’ve defended. And, to some extent, Trump’s legal strategy has succeeded in creating a chilling effect. Lat had earlier reported how the Big Law firms are mostly missing from the many, many legal challenges against Trump’s nonsense policies.

Of course, many of the “settlements” involved promises of pro bono work in support of MAGA/Trump causes, though it’s unclear if any of that has really turned up. There had been some talk last year that Trump’s personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, had tried to get those firms to help Trump negotiate his bullshit trade deals, though it’s unclear if that went any where.

Epshteyn’s involvement is interesting, because it has also been reported that he was the one who actively negotiated the craven “settlement” deals by the law firms that caved, despite not being a federal government employee.

That’s become a real problem for the firms. The American Bar Association had sued the White House last year to try to stop these attacks on law firms. Given the reporting on Epshteyn’s involvement (again, not as a government employee), the ABA has been demanding copies of communications involving Epshteyn.

This appears to have made the DOJ nervous (gee… wonder why?) and it has taken the somewhat strange step of issuing subpoenas to a bunch of the law firms, including most of the ones that “settled” with the administration, while also demanding that some of their top people sit for depositions. And all these big law firms who decided to ditch any principled stand and to agree to a deal with Trump are now put in the awkward position of deciding if they now need to fight the administration they already caved to… or reveal information they’d probably prefer not to reveal.

Mr. Epshteyn serves as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer but negotiated the deals with the firms. Mr. Bannon has publicly praised the deals, saying that he hoped Mr. Trump’s executive orders against the law firms would destroy them.

In response to the demands the Trump administration hand over documents, the Justice Department has asked a federal judge to quash the requests. So far, the judge has not ruled. But in the meantime, the Justice Department subpoenaed the nine law firms that cut deals with Mr. Trump — and four that have fought the executive orders in court — for the same information the association was seeking from the administration.

The government’s subpoenas marked an escalation of the battle surrounding the lawsuit, and aim to put the law firms’ leaders under the same kind of pressure that the bar association’s subpoena put on Mr. Epshteyn, according to people familiar with the matter.

The subpoenas ask for all communications the firms had with Mr. Epshteyn and “any communications concerning the implementation, enforcement or monitoring of” agreements between the firms and the White House, according to the subpoena reviewed by Times.

Apparently, the strategic idea is that by issuing subpoenas to these law firms (again, most of whom already caved and basically admitted that they’re toadies of the administration), perhaps they’ll step in to the fight and help the DOJ try to block the sharing of Epshteyn’s communications. And that creates a fairly uncomfortable choice for these supposedly big, powerful law firms.

The demands have caught the firms flat-footed, unsure of how to respond. Faced with that uncertainty, they have hired high-powered Washington lawyers to represent them as they gear up to face the Justice Department….

Oh gosh, these big powerful lawyers who used to fight the government now have the government putting them in such an impossible position… that they have to hire other lawyers to figure out what to do? Please, someone fetch me the smallest violin.

Meanwhile, the firms that caved and promised to support Trump’s MAGA agenda are worried that if they fight these bogus subpoenas, they’ll be right back to square one, facing a new bullshit executive order that they were too chickenshit to stand up and fight against earlier:

But the Justice Department’s demands have placed the firms that made deals with Mr. Trump in a particularly difficult position, leaving them uncertain how to respond, according to the two people. Some firms fear that if they oppose the administration they will be hit with an executive order, one of the people said.

Maybe, next time, don’t cave. Don’t abandon all principles. Don’t meekly give in to a bully who was never going to leave well enough alone.

While some of the subpoenas went to the law firms that have fought back against Trump, it seems much easier for them to come out and fight the subpoenas, if they choose to do so. Or, hell, they could just cough up Epshteyn’s approaches to get them out there anyway.

When dealing with an authoritarian bully, never obey in advance, never give in when you can stand up for your rights. Those big law firms — Paul Weiss, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Skadden Arps, Willkie Farr, Milbank, A&O Shearman, and Simpson Thacher — caved and now face even further embarrassment. There’s one other firm that’s in a weirder position. Cadwalader (NY’s oldest law firm) was another big law firm that caved, but… just recently merged with Hogan Lovells, which has not caved. And Hogan Lovells is claiming that Cadwalader’s promises to the Trump admin don’t apply to the merged firm. Good luck with that!

Either way, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the position the Trump admin is now putting these firms in. They had a chance to show backbone when it actually mattered, and they folded. Immediately. Now they get to hire more lawyers to figure out how to avoid ratting out the guy they folded for. Lat may have been right that things “hadn’t turned out that poorly” — but ask again in a few months, once these firms are done choosing between betraying Trump or betraying themselves.

The 2026 Microsoft Azure Architect & Administrator Exam Prep Bundle has 9 courses covering a wide range of Azure skills designed to help you pass your certification exams. Courses also include hands-on sections to help you put into practice what the lessons have covered. It’s on sale for $40.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Florida Republicans’ bigoted little piece of speech policing — the former “Stop WOKE Act” — has already been terminated multiple times by federal courts. Two lawsuits with two sets of plaintiffs have generated the same results: a ruling declaring the law unconstitutional and an injunction blocking the state from enforcing it.

The law aims to directly regulate speech in classrooms, allowing the government to punish teachers and administrators from engaging in any speech the Florida GOP doesn’t agree with. In practice, this means eliminating discussions about racism, equitable treatment, or anything related to LGBTQ+ issues.

The two lawsuits have generated some pretty stark paragraphs from presiding judges. Both take their cues from pop culture. Noting the cognitive dissonance of state lawmaking, the court said this in 2022:

In the popular television series Stranger Things, the “upside down” describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world. See Stranger Things (Netflix 2022). Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down. Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely. 

The same court said this when the second lawsuit against the Stop WOKE law crossed its desk:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of “freedom.” To confront certain viewpoints that offend the powers that be, the State of Florida passed the so-called “Stop W.O.K.E.” Act in 2022—redubbed (in line with the State’s doublespeak) the “Individual Freedom Act.” The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy “academic freedom” so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian.

The state appealed both decisions. The Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court upheld the injunction in March 2023. The state continued to assault the court with motions to undo this injunction, prompting the Eleventh Circuit to issue this additional order:

The Clerk is DIRECTED to treat any motion for reconsideration of this order as a non-emergency matter.

Forced to wait its turn, Ron DeSantis and his MAGA buddies have had to wait more than three years just to find out they still won’t be able to enforce this blatantly unconstitutional law. The state’s lawyers will read the whole thing looking for ways to argue this differently if (or when) the US Supreme Court decides to hear their appeal.

But anyone wanting to know how this turns out for Florida’s public service bigots won’t have to dip too far into the 85-page ruling. By the middle of the fourth page, you’ll know what you need to know. From the decision [PDF]:

When several groups of professors challenged Florida’s new restrictions, the State cast about for an existing case or doctrine that could support its speech ban in the university setting. Finding none, it tried to marry public-employee speech cases with government speech doctrine, resulting in a new rule: if the government pays a professor’s salary, it has total control over her classroom speech.

That is not a blessed union. Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth. This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.

The injunction stays in place, presumably forever. While there are certainly some members of the Supreme Court who would love to tie their precedent and ethics into knots just to block speech they personally don’t like, this doesn’t appear to be the case they’d choose since it would likely generate precedent that might work against the bigots in the Supreme Court when they go to bat for bigots in the White House.

The appeals court has already blocked the other part of the law — the clauses attempting to regulate speech in private workplaces by forbidding mandatory meetings that promoted views the GOP doesn’t agree with. The last ditch attempt to claim the government can regulate speech in college classrooms doesn’t fare any better, even if it’s not quite as clear cut in terms of constitutional violations as telling private companies what they can and can’t say.

Claiming that all speech by government employees is “government speech” is a non-starter. The state couldn’t find precedent to support its novel take on the First Amendment. And the few odds and ends it threw at the judicial wall in hopes of seeing something stick failed as well.

More credibly, the State explains that it also seeks to protect its “most cherished ideals.” But that justification fails, too. Though the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint, puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them.

The court spends 50 pages dismantling each and every one of the state’s arguments, citation by citation. There can be no doubt the law is unconstitutional, not that it matters to the state, which has already announced it will be appealing the ruling. But this is censorship that can’t even be bothered to pretend it’s anything but the very thing it claims it is opposed to. “Individual Freedom Act” (as it was renamed), my ass.

Florida seeks to strip public university professors—and by extension their students—of the ability to fully engage with ideas that are, for better or for worse, very popular in some academic circles. The State asks us to consider its rules a means of targeting discrimination. But hearing an idea you disagree with is not discrimination; it is an opportunity to come up with a better idea, or maybe even change your mind.

There’s a dissent that runs nearly as long as the opinion. Written by Judge Barbara Lagoa (someone with a history of anti-trans rulings), it’s 30+ pages of wasted time. To paraphrase: none of these plaintiffs should have been granted standing, much less relief and also: [bunch of Justice Alito quotes].

Doesn’t really matter, since it’s the dissent but I guarantee if anyone’s going to start polling for an en banc rehearing, it’s going by Judge Lagoa.

Suck it, DeSantis. Until that happens (if it ever will), your stupid hateful law is as dead as the eyes of your sycophants.

Not long after twelve states sued Paramount claiming its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers would harm market competition, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) filed their own lawsuit, warning that the massive debt load from the media industry’s latest megamerger will result in an ocean of layoffs for an already reeling U.S. entertainment industry.

The lawsuit notes that the current film industry is dominated by just five players: Disney (ABC), NBCUniversal (Comcast), Sony, Paramount (CBS), and Warner Brothers. Comcast recently restructured to make it easier to sell off its NBC and Universal properties, opening the door to a lot of very quick consolidation in addition to the speedy Skydance/Paramount/Warners merger.

“With fewer competitors, the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. entity would have both the ​incentive and the ability to lower costs by suppressing writers’ wages and reducing output. Writers will be paid less and ​have fewer employment opportunities,” the WGA complaint said.

Supreme Court precedent (for whatever that’s worth anymore) has long indicated that any merger
yielding a post-merger market share exceeding 30% (which this deal does) is presumptively anticompetitive. The WGA notes that muted competition will result not just in fewer jobs, but lower wages and fewer opportunities for creatives overall across both film and television.

“With fewer competitors, the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. entity would have both
the incentive and the ability to lower costs by suppressing writers’ wages and reducing output.
Writers will be paid less and have fewer employment opportunities,” the lawsuit states.

While Paramount would like to pretend this is a debate, and most U.S. press outlets bury the lede, U.S. history is vividly clear on the harms created by media consolidation. That was most recently personified by AT&T’s disastrous acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, which resulted in upward of 50,000 layoffs, higher prices, worse service, and no shortage of shuttered creative projects.

The rushed acquisitions of both CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers — all so Larry Ellison’s son can play media mogul — have created a particularly heavy debt load of $79 billion. Such debt is always paid for by consumers and labor, often in more ways than one.

Paramount has promised to release 30 theatrical releases per year and to keep them in exclusively for theaters for 45 days, but as I’ve long made clear, pre-merger promises are utterly worthless. Especially in a country dead set on steadily lobotomizing its public interest regulators. As we’ve seen with consolidation in sectors like wireless, America’s favorite pastime is pretending to ignore the harms of pointless mergers.

This is a pretty clear example of the kind of consolidation that should be blocked for the benefit of labor, markets, and consumers, but despite a lot of rambling pretense about a love of free market competition and entrepreneurial spirit, America consistently fails to walk the talk on antitrust, the impact of which is abundant and getting exponentially worse under pay-to-play Trumpism.