@debpearlstein
Director, Program on Law & Public Policy, Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs. Charles & Marie Robertson Visiting Professor of Law & Public Affairs. Still teaching Con law, still aiming to get out of the new social media market.
"Once universities and their allies recovered from their shock and challenged Trump, they were able to block many, if not most, of the White House’s moves in court. Trump has certainly left his mark on America’s universities. But he has not broken them."
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Recall that the Trump family crypto business has profited enormously from Binance support.
Pretty sure this is what they used to call war profiteering.
Important ruling on immigration operations in Minnesota
Judge Tostrud (Trump appointee):
"Plaintiffs have made a clear showing that Defendants have adopted a POLICY authorizing federal immigration officers to conduct investigatory stops based on ethnicity or race without reasonable suspicion."
1/
Crucially important read:
The DHS is abusing its power to brand American protesters as terrorists.
WSJ: 181 of the 279 “people accused by officials on X of attacking federal officers in the past year” are U.S. citizens.
About 1/2 never charged.
0 convicted.
www.wsj.com/us-news/immi...
A water desalination plant is presumptively a civilian object & it is an object indispensable to survival.
Targeting a civilian object is a war crime.
Targeting an object indispensable to survival can implicate the starvation war crime.
NB: carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202...
Caitlin KALINOWSKI over X I resigned from OpenAl. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn't an easy call. Al has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I'm proud of what we built together.
OpenAI head of robotics just resigned over company deal with the Pentagon saying…
“Surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got”
An imperfect solution to something that should never have been a problem. But there's something fitting about the fact that this went up at the hands of AOC employees who simply showed up to do their jobs today, just as the folks it honors did on Jan. 6. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
61 years ago today at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama.
Documents reveal a web of financial ties between Trump officials and the industries they help regulate:
ProPublica is releasing a trove of disclosure records that detail the finances of more than 1,500 Trump appointees who declined to identify former clients.
DOJ has produced, and Judge Boasberg has ordered unsealed, transcripts from three hearings in the investigations that led to Trump's federal indictments.
charliesavage.com/2026/03/hear...
Reuters Exclusive
"U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school."
"The strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the Middle East."
NEW: The Navy is no longer allowed to shroud its criminal trials in secrecy and must provide public access to hearings and records, a federal judge ruled last month, the result of a yearslong lawsuit filed by ProPublica.
The case, filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., accuses the Trump administration of ignoring legislation designed to stop the spread of Chinese propaganda — and instead helping to broker a partial sale to businessmen close to Trump. n.pr/3ONX6AB
I talked to Slate this week about why the whole law firm fight is so important - and how effective the administration's attacks have been (despite their losses in court) in chilling BigLaw's willingness to take on any fight adverse to the administration.
Idaho — a deeply Republican state — has become the latest to refuse the Trump Justice Department’s demand for unredacted statewide voter rolls. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
👇
Missed this. "[D]ays before the US launched a major military op in Iran, Patel fired a dozen agents & staff from a counterintelligence unit tasked w/monitoring threats from Iran," per 2 sources familiar. "Each was involved in the investigation of Trump’s alleged retention of classified docs..."
I’m struck by how every day the admin is like “whoever could have foreseen these consequences?!” when the consequences thus far — evacuations, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, rise in gas prices, etc. — are all the literal most obvious consequences.
They completely, 100% dropped the ball. For US embassy personnel and their families. For Americans throughout the region.
For years on my old blog I published the names of servicemembers who died in Iraq & Afghanistan. No other outlets were.
These are the first 4 Americans to die in the Iran War.
Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35
Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42
Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39
Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is calling for Kristi Noem to resign over her handling of the deadly Minneapolis immigration operation.
Congressional Dems renew demands of Kirkland & Ellis (which committed nearly $1bil in legal services after being threatened w/EEOC investigation) to explain what free legal services the firm is concededly (per letter) providing to federal agencies.
Clown show was my thought exactly. "The situation remained fluid Tuesday morning. It was not immediately clear what legal strategy the administration would ultimately embrace or whether a court would allow the Justice Department to reverse course...."
The weirdness of a DOJ leak hours before any filing made clear there was some kind of internal fight going on. I guess it's still going. The incompetence knows no bounds.
Don’t mind if I do! 🗳️ ✔️
#NCElections
Scenes from a personalist regime
Federal judge: I've been at this for 44 years. I have never encountered the hostility toward the judiciary that has existed in this country in the last year.
As the laid off Middle East News Editor, I concur. Management eliminated the positions of every single staff correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East.
