How Does Mike Davis Know Who A New Grand Jury Will Target?

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

The Punishment: Mar-a-Lago Edition?

This gets a little complicated, but it’s potentially very important, so bear with me for a moment here.

Bloomberg News investigated a federal grand jury in Florida that could be another common thread in President Trump’s wide-ranging investigation into investigators’ retaliation plan.

News that a grand jury is set to investigate a bogus Democratic-led “grand conspiracy” against Trump was leaked by Trump ally Mike Davis — the conservative legal activist who briefly worked for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — during an appearance last week on The Charlie Kirk Show:

Asked by the host about the next steps in an investigation into a “grand conspiracy” against Trump, Davis responded that U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones — whom he described as “my buddy” — had received court approval for a grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, which “should be fully operational by January.”

Davis said the court order he was referring to was a “public document.”

These comments didn’t get much attention until Davis posted them on X yesterday. This appears to have prompted Bloomberg to seek out the public document Davis referenced.

Bloomberg weighed in with a court order from U.S. District Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga, chief judge of the Southern District of Florida, which was filed on September 26. Following a request from the Department of Justice, she ordered two grand juries to be impaneled beginning January 12, 2026, one in Ft. Lauderdale and the other in Ft. Drill. As Davis said in his X post: “We need a special grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida. This is ground zero for the Mar-a-Lago raid.”

Davis declined to comment to Bloomberg, but during his Oct. 17 appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show, Davis warned “law Democrats” that it was time to “hire a lawyer”:

After discussing the grand jury order, Davis raised the need for an investigation into whether a number of former officials from the Biden and Obama administrations conspired to violate Trump’s rights.

“I would say to those right-wing Democrats who have carried out this unprecedented Russian collusion hoax aimed at ending the Republic against President Trump, his top aides and his supporters for the last eight years, I would tell those right-wing Democrats to defend themselves,” Davis said.

While the court order Bloomberg found is consistent with what Davis has publicly claimed, a lot remains murky and…strange, to say the least.

It is not clear from the court order or other publicly available information what Ft. The Pierce grand jury will investigate. If the plan is to investigate a MAGA fever dream of a “grand conspiracy” against President Trump, it’s not clear what the precise flavor of this particular conspiracy is, although the fact that it falls under the same division as the Mar-a-Lago classified documents affair might provide a clue. It is also unclear why the Justice Department would need such a long delay before the grand jury begins its work in January.

But more importantly, it’s highly unusual for someone like Mike Davis to have information about what a yet-to-be impaneled federal grand jury is doing, including who it will target, even though he is a good friend of the U.S. Attorney. Or at least it would have been extraordinarily unusual before the Justice Department began to be shut out of the Trump II White House.

Bloomberg places the new Florida grand jury in the broader context of its own earlier report on another federal grand jury investigation into investigators that Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly ordered over the summer after securing a criminal referral from DNI Tulsi Gabbard with allegations of a “2016 treasonous plot committed by officials at the highest levels of our government” against Trump.

“President Obama and members of his National Security Cabinet fabricated and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump,” the DNI said in a July press release. That prompted a rare public rebuke from an Obama spokesperson at the time.

Davis’ use of the term “lawfare” might be telling. If the previous grand jury was used to target intelligence on the alleged deep state conspiracy against Trump, it is plausible that Ft. The Pierce grand jury could be a complementary vehicle for retaliation against prosecutors and investigators. But we – or at least those of us not named Mike Davis – don’t really know.

Last week, the day before Davis’ remarks, Trump himself stood in the Oval Office next to Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel and asked them to investigate former special counsel Jack Smith, former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.

“It’s time to bring every name to light. Every single one of them will be brought to justice,” Davis said on X.

Retribution: IWWG Edition

A group of former intelligence, law enforcement and State Department officials have warned that the Trump administration’s recently revealed interagency weapons task force threatens to become “an American KGB,” reports Jeff Stein.

Corruption: $230 million edition

President Trump filed suit against the U.S. government well before his reelection, seeking compensation for the investigations and lawsuits he faced from the Justice Department. Now those claims – totaling some $230 million – could be paid to him by his own Justice Department, where he has appointed his personal lawyers as top officials.

Even Trump – not very sensitive to appearances – acknowledged the conflict of interest: “I’m the one who makes the decision and that decision should go through my office and it’s terribly strange to make a decision where I pay myself. »

Destruction: literally

With the emergence of new photographs, it became abundantly clear yesterday that President Trump has ordered the demolition of the entire East Wing of the White House to make way for the construction of his inadequate and gaudy ballroom.

“They are destroying everything,” Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist and professor emeritus at Towson University, told WaPo. “And these are changes that cannot be undone. They destroy this history forever.”

The latest news on Venezuela

• New Yorker: The real target of Trump’s war on drug boats
• WaPo: Trump beats the drum of war for direct action in Venezuela
• NYT: Ecuadorian prosecutors have decided not to charge a man who survived a U.S. strike in the Caribbean and have already released him.

Ingrassia is absent

After some initial confusion over whether US special adviser nominee Paul Ingrassia was canceling his appearance at his confirmation hearing tomorrow or withdrawing his nomination altogether, the White House confirmed it was withdrawing him entirely following his “I have a bit of a Nazi leaning” text.

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