Trump’s Lawless Rampage Is Only Accelerating

A lot has happened. Here are some of the things. This is the TPM Morning Memo.

The relentless immensity of Trump II

In recent weeks, the Democrats’ performance in the off-year elections and the dismissal of the indictments of James Comey and Letitia James have created a general feeling that a turning point may have been reached in the presidency of Trump II. But the long-standing pattern remains true: When Trump is framed or thwarted on one front, he bolts in different directions, continuing to violate laws, borders and norms, often with even greater fervor.

Trump has long disrupted the idea that defeat, rejection and official reprimand punishes the offender or at least provides some measure of future deterrence. This is not the case with Trump. Despite the recent surprises, the volume of transgressions does not seem to have decreased at all, as the following few elements show…

New indictment for Letitia James arrives

A new indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James on trumped-up mortgage fraud charges is expected today in the Eastern District of Virginia, where the original indictment was dismissed last week because Acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan was not properly appointed. Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Keller, based in Missouri, is expected to present the case to a grand jury, according to MSNOW.

Because he can’t have the Nobel Peace Prize?

President Trump renamed the United States Institute of Peace…for himself.

Corruption: forgiveness edition

• President Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández – a notorious drug trafficker – even as the Trump administration claims to target drug cartels in illegal attacks on the high seas, was granted in part thanks to the intervention of a group of figures including Roger Stone and Matt Gaetz.
• Trump pardoned stadium promoter Timothy Leiweke of charges brought by his own Justice Department in July.
• Trump pardoned Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar (TX) and his wife while charges against them for accepting nearly $600,000 in foreign bribes remained pending.

Revenge of Trump’s Seditious Plot

FBI headquarters is pressuring agents in the field to investigate Democratic lawmakers for seditious conspiracy after the release of a video urging military and intelligence personnel to follow the law and not comply with illegal orders, Bloomberg reports. But the desire to investigate is met with resistance due to the absence of a file:

Career leaders in the bureau’s Washington field office have so far rebuffed the demand for a formal investigation, which would follow President Donald Trump’s call for a trial over Democrats’ “seditious behavior,” the sources said. Supervisors in the Washington office cited the lack of legal and factual basis for initiating criminal proceedings…

Seditious conspiracy is the most serious charge some Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have been convicted of in the Jan. 6 attack. Trump later commuted their sentences.

Trump foils January 6 trial

President Trump is claiming executive privilege to protect himself in a years-old civil lawsuit filed against him by police officers injured in the Jan. 6 attack. The new invocation of executive privilege is an attempt to block a 2024 subpoena to the National Archives and Records Administration for White House documents dating to Trump’s first term.

BREAKING: Pipe bomb suspect arrested

Very few details at this time, but the FBI reportedly arrested a man in Virginia this morning who is suspected of placing the two pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC headquarters just steps from the Capitol on the eve of the January 6, 2021 attack on Congress. The identity of the suspect and the charges against him have not yet been made public.

Jack Smith subpoenaed by House GOP

After refusing to voluntarily testify before the House Judiciary Committee unless he could do so publicly, former special counsel Jack Smith was subpoenaed to appear before the committee behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, Trump’s DOJ is encouraging U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to never release the sealed Volume II of Smith’s final report, which concerns the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

Monitoring killings on the high seas

• Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley will give a classified briefing to members of Congress today, in which the defense against murder for survivors of an illegal attack on a suspected drug smuggling boat would be that they were calling for help by radio, which in itself was considered a hostile act. I’ll just let you sit with this.
• Admiral Alvin Holsey, who as commander in chief of Southern Command oversaw the buildup of U.S. forces in the Caribbean, did not voluntarily retire early but was asked to resign by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after becoming “concerned about the murky legal authority of the boat strike campaign,” according to the WSJ.
• CNN and WaPo each have ticks on the Trump administration’s shifting explanations for the double-tap strike and the deadly boat strike campaign more generally.

FTW Libraries

All library grants canceled by President Trump have been reinstated by the Institute of Museum and Library Services following a court ruling last month that his executive order gutting the small agency was illegal.

The hardest results

President Trump’s illegal dismantling of USAID contributed to the first increase in global infant mortality since at least 1990, according to a new report from the Gates Foundation. Nearly a quarter of a million more children under the age of 5 are estimated to die globally in 2025 than in 2024.

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