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On this show:
First, Trump national security officials planned the granular details of the U.S. bombing campaign of Yemen, not on official classified channels, but rather on the popular messaging app Signal. Before they began planning that bombing attack on that platform, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, for some reason, added to their group one of the journalists most responsible for the most frauds of the last 20 years, as well as some of the most baseless attacks on Donald Trump himself, the editor in chief of the Atlantic and former IDF prison guard, Jeffrey Goldberg. We'll look at what we know from these chats to gain insight into the foreign policy ideology and mindset dominating Trump's thus far quite militaristic foreign policy.
Then: In the oral argument held this afternoon, the appellate judges in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, generally considered the highest appeals court right below the Supreme Court, were openly hostile – aggressively hostile at times – to most, if not all of the Trump's lawyers' reasons as to why no due process is required before shipping Venezuelans and other foreign nationals to a notorious prison in El Salvador, to spend the rest of their lives in prison. We'll report on that hearing and the broader legal and Constitutional issues arrayed by this increasingly acrimonious fight over the Constitution and due process.
Finally: over the past 24 hours, they somehow outdid themselves and reached new lows. First, Israel targeted and then slaughtered two young Palestinian journalists who have been among the most effective in showing the world the realities of Gaza over the last 15 months – reporting they continued to do quite bravely despite an endless stream of death threats from the IDF, meaning they would be killed if they continued to speak out. Then, perhaps even more shockingly, the producer of the documentary on Israel and Palestine that just won an Oscar at last month's Academy Award ceremony was attacked and almost fatally lynched by Israeli settlers, not in Gaza but in the West Bank, settlements that the entire world considers to be illegally occupying that land and as the ambulance sped to a hospital to try and save this Oscar-winning filmmaker, the IDF dragged him from the ambulance and then arrested him – they did not arrest the settlers who beat him nearly to death but the Oscar-winning filmmaker who had just been near-fatally beaten.
There are simply no limits or standards of law and morality the Israeli government recognizes at this point and if you're an American citizen, you are absolutely responsible for everything that is being done because it's being done with your money, your resources, your arms and weapons and your diplomatic protection without which Israel cannot carry out these atrocities.
A major reason I found myself interested in and even seeing potential in the Trump movement as it has evolved over the last eight years is that they had adopted and begun to advocate a foreign policy that they were describing as both anti-war and anti-intervention, including critiques that the United States has involved itself in far too many wars, especially in the Middle East, including ones where our direct interest and security were not really at state.
Donald Trump prided himself on the fact that he did not involve the U.S. in any new wars in his first term and said he was determined to continue that and it was in his second term that he wanted to be remembered by history as a peacemaker, not somebody who started wars, but as someone who ended them. He talked often about ending the war in Ukraine and Russia. He patted himself on the back quite a bit for the cease-fire deal in Gaza that he engineered before he was inaugurated.
Yet, over the past two months, we have seen a very bellicose, very militaristic, and at times war-creating foreign policy. They're definitely trying to stop the war in Ukraine and Russia. I just believe they deserve a lot of credit for that – I've given them a lot of credit for it – but, at the same time, they not only stood by and gave the green light, but encouraged Israel to restart the destruction of Gaza, even though there's very little left in Gaza to destroy.
In other words, they unraveled their own cease-fire deal that they themselves negotiated and facilitated by demanding that Hamas and the Gazans abandon it and release all hostages immediately instead of following the schedule set out in that cease-fire.
Even the most pro-Israel voices in the U.S. and Israel have acknowledged that Netanyahu told his right-wing cabinet members from the beginning, don't worry about this cease-fire, we're only going to do the first stage and once we get some hostages back, we're going to resume the war and to get rid of the Gazans out of Gaza entirely. And that's exactly what he set out to do and is now doing.
And then of course you have the Trump administration's new war – you really could call it a new war because it had stopped finally under Biden, once he was on his way out during the transition which was the bombing campaign that Biden carried out throughout all of 2024, constantly dropping weapons and bombs on the Houthis in Yemen. Trump criticized Joe Biden for it, often doing so every day, saying there's no need to drop bombs on Yemen. Yet, early this month, the Trump administration announced very proudly, very publicly, that they were not only bombing Yemen but doing so in a very aggressive way, in a sustained campaign. And that's what they're doing.
They're carrying out massive bombing campaigns all throughout Yemen, killing many civilians and targeting Houthis and the like. Exactly the policy that Biden carried out for the same reasons, with the same exact rationale. Although as we've gone over before, and we've read you the accounts, at least Biden had the excuse when he was doing it – when Trump was criticizing him – that the Houthis were attacking American ships in the Red Sea and elsewhere.
Once there was a cease-fire deal and Israel was no longer bombing Gaza, the Houthis stopped their attacks: they said they would and they did. Only once the Israelis blockaded humanitarian aid from entering Gaza as the agreement called for, did they say, “We're going to attack Israeli ships,” Israel-flagged ships only until they allow the humanitarian aid into Gaza as required by that agreement.” So, they weren't even attacking American ships at the time this bombing campaign was initiated. I agreed with Trump's criticism of Biden, but at least Biden had an argument, whereas Trump doesn't.
Earlier today, Jeffrey Goldberg, the longtime editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, which has been one of the most anti-Trump magazines in the country, ground zero during the Russiagate hysteria, who, during the 2020 election, claimed anonymously that Trump had disparaged the soldiers who died fighting as losers and suckers, then, in this election, he was the one who kept quoting General Milley and General Kelly claiming that Trump had said he admired Hitler and was a fascist – so, he’s not one of the most unscrupulous operatives in D.C. over the last 20 to 25 years but also one of the most vociferously anti-Trump ones – Goldberg wrote an article earlier today in The Atlantic, which by the way, is owned by the billionaire heiress Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, who inherited his billions and became a major donor to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris:
This is shocking. It's not just one of a standard classified conversation – all conversations in Washington are “classified” – this is as sensitive as it gets. They are talking here about a surprise attack on a country that the United States was not bombing, and they were talking about the most precise detailed operational aspects of this bombing campaign: where they were going to bomb, exactly what time they were going to start bombing, which military weapons they were going to use to bomb.
Obviously, anybody who gets this information and leaks it could sabotage the attack or put service members who are carrying it out in obvious danger. If the Houthis knew exactly where planes were coming from and what targets they were going to use, they could do all sorts of things to sabotage it. To put Jeffrey Goldberg into a top-secret meeting, even though he has no top-secret security clearance – seemingly by mistake, but who knows? – that is incompetence on a security breach of the most extreme kind you can imagine.
But that's something for other people to worry about, I'm not particularly concerned with national security breaches like that. I think way too much is classified. Although even I, generally on the far end of absolutism when it comes to state and government transparency recognize and I've always said that, of course, some things ought to be secret, some things ought to be hidden. Well, one of those is troop movements.
This would be like if you planned D-Day and accidentally included Nazi sympathizing or communist sympathizing or anti-American journalists in your planning meeting and they learned the details in advance of the invasion of Normandy. I mean it's on that level of breach.
But I'll let others worry about that, what I'm more interested in is the debate that ensued, the conversation about the bombing attack and who said what, to get a glimpse into the mindset of Trump's national security team.
So, here's what Goldberg wrote:
[…] At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the Suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)
On the one hand, this is not a very vehement objection, he wasn't pounding the table and saying, “This is wrong and we cannot do this.” You have to remember that JD Vance has a potentially purely empty and symbolic role in the Trump administration. He's the vice president. He really has no official duties. Whatever duties he gets, whatever influence he has, is solely because Trump gives it to him. Therefore, he's always being quite careful not to seem like he's a radical dissident to the Trump agenda.
Nonetheless, he and he alone did stand up and say, “I think this is a mistake” because there are no real U.S. interests involved here. We have a tiny amount of shipping that goes to the Suez. It's the Europeans who have enormous amounts and why are we out there demanding that Europe take responsibility for its own defense and that we not bear the brunt of it anymore? Here we are about to do exactly that in a way that the public won't understand.
I guess you might consider it a coincidence – I don't – that the position of the Houthis under Trump has been not that we're going to attack American ships, but that we are only going to attack Israeli ships. To me, this is much more a bombing campaign designed to protect Israel than to protect the Europeans. No one's going to say that and no one is going to admit that, but that's the truth. And yet it was J.D. Vance, despite the extremely insignificant, almost trivial, connection to U.S. interests, who stood up and said, this is wrong, this was a mistake.
[…] The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)
So, he was essentially saying, “This is wrong, I'm against it, but at least let's wait a month so we can figure out what we're really doing here. Why the urgency? Why the immediacy?”
[HEGSETH MESSAGE]
[…] At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)
In other words, they have no way to explain to the American people why bombing the Houthis is in their interest, why bombing Yemen is in their interest, so, Hegseth is saying, let's just simplify it and just avoid the real reasons and just say Biden failed even though Biden actually bombed Yemen continuously throughout 2024.
This is always the Republican narrative: the Democrats are weak. They say Democrats and Biden were weak on Israel even though the United States under Biden paid for Israel's entire war, funded and armed that war, diplomatically protected Israel every day of the U.N. – and it was Obama who signed a deal on his way out of office with Netanyahu to give the Israelis $38 billion in military aid over 10 years.
But of course, the Fox News Republican narrative always has to be, “Oh, the Democrats hate Israel,” etc. Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Democrat, has a book out warning of the antisemitism crisis that has engulfed America and said, “My job is to make sure the left stays pro-Israel.” The idea that Democrats are weak on Israel or the Middle East or whatever is laughable. It's a joke. But Hegseth is saying that's how we have to sell it to the public: Biden failed and let's scare them over the connection to Iran.
[…] The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease-fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.” […] (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)
Very ironic that Pete Hegseth is promising a 100% OPSEC operational security on this plan when they're all doing this planning in front of an anti-Trump journalist that they have no idea has been invited by the National Security Advisor into this group unwittingly or otherwise.
Goldberg goes on:
[YEMEN BOMBINGS]
It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.
At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.
The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)
According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. Eastern time. So, I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city. (The Atlantic. March 24, 2025.)
Nobody is denying that the chat is authentic. When the State Department spokesperson was asked why this happened, she simply said, “We’re not commenting on it.”
At Donald Trump's press appearance, which, to his credit, he does essentially every day in the Roosevelt Room, a reporter in a very weird, timid way asked Trump about this story and Trump denied all knowledge of it. Here's what he said.
Video. Donald Trump, C-SPAN2. March 24, 2025.
The Atlantic article came out and everybody in Washington in the political circles was talking about it. I don't doubt actually that Trump hasn't heard about it, sometimes he doesn't follow the news cycle all that closely. But later after this, the White House put out a statement through Karoline Levitt, the White House press secretary, saying President Trump has full and complete confidence in his National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, even though Mike Waltz added a journalist, a hostile journalist, to their planning for a new war – and that's illegal by the way, to transmit classified information to someone not authorized to receive it, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, others in the Trump administration have said they will have zero tolerance for leaks of classified information.
They're lucky that Jeffrey Goldberg is obviously in favor of the bombing of Yemen because it helps Israel, whose foreign military he joined and served as a prison guard in an Israeli detention camp for Palestinians and he's been an advocate of the Iraq war, did more than anybody to spread the lie that Saddam Hussein was involved in al-Qaeda in order to justify that war. So, obviously it was safe in that sense because Jeffrey Goldberg was going to be a supporter of it. He has a very similar worldview to Mike Waltz. Both of them are standard GOP militarists and neocons. But still, a gigantic mistake at best, a huge national security breach, and had it been done with the wrong person, it could easily have put the lives of American troops in harm's way.
And why were they using Signal? The government pays for extremely sophisticated classified networks to talk about these sorts of things. I consider Signal relatively safe among commercial apps. It's probably the safest. It's the one I use when I'm having conversations that I don't want to be easily invaded, but it's far from invulnerable.
[…]
Here's the issue I have: aside from the fact that there's, no denying, a gigantic gap between what MAGA said they wanted Trump to do when he won. Then, Trump got into office and, less than two months later, he's bombing Yemen. Are there very many MAGA advocates, MAGA influencers and Republican conservative pundits who are denouncing this? There are some, but not many and this is the same exact thing with the free speech issue.
Conservatives have probably been most contemptuous over the last decade of the attempt to limit free speech on campus in the name of protecting the sensibilities and creating safe spaces for various minority groups. Trump gets into office and one of his primary focuses is to eliminate antisemitism on college campuses to force Columbia to adopt a broader definition of antisemitism, such that various criticisms of Israel are outlawed in the name of making Jewish students feel safe. I am not talking here about deporting protesters; I'm talking about forcing speech codes on Columbia and in other schools as well. You don't hear very many MAGA advocates and pundits and employers and the like object to that either, even though, they've been waiving the free speech banner incessantly for the last decade, especially when it comes to college campuses. And this is something I've seen in my journalism career every single time there's a change in party control in the White House, every single time.
When people are out of power, they embrace values and beliefs, and they appeal to constitutional principles and whatever they use to condemn the opposite party when they're in power. Then, the minute their party gets into power, they forget about every single value they pretended to believe in, even if the president of their party is carrying on the same policies that they so vehemently denounced when carried out by the prior party.
The first time I ever saw that was the first time there was a party change in the White House while I was a journalist – I started in 2005, condemning the War on Terror, writing every day about the due process violations of the War and Terror, the spying and privacy violations of American citizens, rendition and torture and imprisoning people with no trial – and I built up a gigantic Democrat Party and liberal audience, along with a libertarian one, but the minute the Republicans are out of the office and Barack Obama takes office in 2009, and continues to carry on many, in fact, most of the same War on Terror policies that I had spent years viciously denouncing, huge numbers of Democrats in my audience were like, “Wait a minute, I didn't really believe these things. I was just using them to attack George Bush. I don't want to hear these criticisms of Barack Obama,” and I lost a good part of my audience – and kept a good part as well, but you see it every single time there's a change of party control. They either start overlooking the things that they say they find so objectionable or start twisting themselves into pretzels to justify it because now their side is doing it.
Trump undid his cease-fire and caused a new war in Gaza, even though there's barely anything left to destroy there – but we're paying for and arming. He restarted a Biden bombing campaign in Yemen, two different wars in the Middle East while Israel bombed Syria and Lebanon and accused part of those countries – basically have a giant Middle East war led by the United States and Israel – exactly the kind of wars that Trump for a decade has been promising to end and you barely hear protests from his followers, the people who said they believe in the MAGA vision, the MAGA mentality that he laid out, his criticism of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy, the constant permanent war from the deep state – the war machine and the military-industrial complex, all that's gone, gone from the MAGA lips in order to cheer for what Trump is doing.
I understand the temptation involved in that, I understand that if you are happy that your president is doing a lot of what you hoped he would do, you're very reluctant to criticize him. There's also a big economic factor in independent media, which is if you did build an audience based on Trump supporters, and then you turn around and start criticizing him sometimes you're going to alienate a lot of your audience, and a lot of people are afraid to do that. They get imprisoned by the audience they've created because they purposely have set out to create a partisan pro-Trump or pro-Biden or pro-Cuomo, whatever, audience, and they're there to hear praise of those people, not criticism of them.
But if you don't want to be a fraud if you want to have any credibility in what you claim, someday there's going to be a Democratic president, you stand up again and start screaming that you're anti-war and don't want foreign wars and don' like censorship. No one's gonna take you seriously. Why would they? They just watched you do everything that you could possibly do to justify the very things you claim to denounce – and I'm not saying all MAGA supporters are doing that, I know some who aren't, I respect the ones who aren't, but there's a lot of them and the fact that we're two months into the Trump administration and the only person in the group who said, “Wait a minute, why are we bombing Yemen?” – like, what does that have to do with America First and American interests? – was JD Vance, someone who has no real authority. And because of that, they ran roughshod over him and ignored him and by the end, he was saying, “Okay, I'm on board. I won't express any disagreements publicly and I'm praying for the success of our mission.” And that gives you a real sense of the very traditionally militaristic foreign policy that a lot of these long-time establishment Republicans who Trump built his cabinet with have, and it shows that they are really getting their way.
It shouldn't surprise anybody that the Trump administration is deporting people who are in the country illegally and they're doing so in an aggressive manner. After all, if you had to pick one issue, one promise, that was Trump's signature issue ever since he emerged on the political scene, it would be deporting illegal aliens. That was the very first thing he talked about when he descended that escalator in Trump Tower and gave the speech that propelled him to the start of the polls. He has a democratic mandate for it, he was twice elected on that promise. Polls show that they want that.
The reality is, though, despite all these showy controversies, these flamboyant distractions, there are no mass deportations taking place. The rate of deportations under Trump is similar to, even a little bit less than, it was under Biden for this time period. Part of the reason is that Trump has succeeded in virtually shutting the border, so there aren't a lot of people entering the country illegally over the border and that counted for a lot of the deportations Biden has done, but the numbers are nowhere near what anyone can consider mass deportation in the scope of how many illegal aliens there are in the United States. Maybe that number will increase, but it's not now. There doesn't seem to be a lot of urgency to that.
What we're getting instead are these side shows, almost an exploitation of the promise to engage in mass deportations. The first one was going to Colombia and targeting for deportation, not people who were in the United States illegally, but people who are in the United States very legally, with student visas, with work visas, even with green cards, which are considered permanent resident status. And they started deporting those people for the crime of protesting, you'll never guess which country, the one that half of the things we talk about as a nation end up focusing on, which is Israel.
So, there's been a lot of deportation controversy surrounding deporting people in the U.S. legally, which has nothing to do with Trump's mass deportation promise and then you have a controversy that has been created, not because Trump deported illegal aliens because the deportation of illegal aliens is always meant, not just in the United States, but essentially every country in the democratic world, taking people inside the country illegally and sending them back to their country of origin, meaning where they're a citizen. So, if you deport Guatemalans, they get deported back to Guatemala, if you deport illegal aliens who are Chinese, you deport them back to China, etc. That's how deportation works, that deportation means.
As we know, and we reported this last week at length, that's not what the Trump administration is doing. Over the weekend, last weekend, they took 237 Venezuelans, who are not citizens of El Salvador, who have never been citizens of El Salvador, probably in every case, certainly most of them have never been to El Salvador or have nothing to do with El Salvador, and they didn't deport them just to go back to their countries; they purposely deported them to a third-party country that they have nothing to do with and paid the El Salvadoran government to put them into one of the world's worst, most notorious, and abusive prisons, from where the El Salvadoran president, essentially the dictator of El Salvador, said they very well may never leave. That's what that prison is for, it's intended to completely strip people of their humanity and ignore human rights or principles concerning prisons.
The argument of the Trump administration as to why they sent them to prison was because they were all members of a violent Venezuelan drug gang, Tren de Aragua. The problem with that claim is that they were accusing people of severe criminality without any kind of evidentiary hearing where they were going to present the evidence demonstrating this accusation was true and giving the accused the opportunity to contest it.
So, the Trump administration comes in and says, “Oh, look, he has a tattoo that is associated with this gang” and the person accused can say, “No, actually, this is a tattoo of my favorite soccer team, Real Madrid,” that is worldwide known and the ICE agents misinterpreted it, which is exactly what happened, at least in one case.
So, the problem here is not the Trump Administration deporting illegal aliens, the problem is the Trump Administration sending people to life in prison with zero due process, zero opportunity for them to contest the accusations against them. As a result, all we’re left to do is to piece together whatever evidence emerges in the media, or from their families, or from the lawyers, and say, wait a minute, there's at least serious doubt about this person, and this person and this person and this person. It seems very unlikely that they're actually in Tren del Agua. Unfortunately, the government didn't have to prove anything, and they didn't have a chance to disprove it. They were just swept onto a plane and thrown into that prison where now no U.S. court can even order them released because the El Salvadoran government can obviously ignore U.S. court orders.
The Trump administration's response to all of this was once a judge, a federal district court judge, who as a reminder is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, ordered an injunction against this program – in fact, ordered those detainees not to be taken to El Salvador – they took them to El Salvador anyway. And the judge as a result extended his injunction on this program saying, “You cannot deport people to life in prison without some kind of a hearing, without some opportunity for them to go to court and argue that they're being wrongfully accused.”
There's been a major Trump White House media war and a MAGA social media war on the particular judge who ruled this way, calling him a far-left judge, even though he has so many hearings, some of which have been in favor of decisions which are far from left, some of which have been against the Mueller investigation, some of which had been in favor of Trump. But the way our legal system works is that if you want to sue the government, you can't go right to the Supreme Court, you can't go to an appellate court. You have to go to a federal district court judge. That's where essentially, with very few exceptions, every legal case originates. Federal district court judges absolutely have the power to enjoin the federal government from doing something – in fact, conservatives constantly went into federal court under the Clinton administration, under the Obama administration and under the Biden administration to ask a district court judge to issue and often succeeded in getting a district court judges to issue an injunction blocking what the Biden administration wanted to do, not just for that district, but nationwide.
This idea that federal district court judges have no power or authority to enjoin the federal government from violating the law or the Constitution, nobody has ever thought this before. This is always how our court system has worked at least since Marbury v. Madison, which resolved the question of who interprets the Constitution – the courts did and ever since that has been how our legal system has worked and both sides have fully taken advantage of that by getting the other party's president's policies invalidated or declared unconstitutional. And yet, there's outrage over this injunction.
From AP:
President Donald Trump on Monday questioned the impartiality of the federal judge who blocked his plans to deport Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, leveling his criticism only hours before his administration will ask an appeals court to lift the judge’s order.
Just after midnight, Trump posted a social media message calling for Chief Judge James Boasberg to be disbarred. Trump reposted an article about Boasberg’s attendance at a legal conference that purportedly featured “anti-Trump speakers.”
The judge, meanwhile, refused Monday to throw out his original order before an appeals court hearing for the case. Boasberg ruled that the immigrants facing deportation must get an opportunity to challenge their designations as alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang. He said there is “a strong public interest in preventing the mistaken deportation of people based on categories they have no right to challenge.” (AP News. March 24, 2025.)
That's all he's saying is before you can put someone in prison based on the government say-so that these people are members of this violent gang that you've declared a terrorist organization, they have to have an opportunity to disprove that accusation.
That decision was appealed by the Trump Justice Department, to the D.C. Court of Appeals. We have 13 different appellate courts in the United States. The D.C. Court Of Appeals is for D.C. It typically rules on federal government action. It's considered the most prestigious court of all the Court of Appeals courts right below the Supreme Court. One of the three judges who sat on the panel, one of them was a Trump appointee, Justin Walker.
I’ve attended a lot of oral arguments; I've participated in a lot of oral arguments as a lawyer and I've covered a lot of oral arguments as a journalist. Honestly, I’m serious here, I don't recall an oral argument where the judges on the panel were so blatantly and glaringly opposed to everything the government lawyers were saying.
Oftentimes, they'll try tough questions for each side and a lot of times you walk away not really knowing how they're going to rule. Sometimes you walk away knowing how they’re going to rule because they were somewhat more assertive with one side than the other. In this hearing, they just badgered the DOJ lawyer, rejecting aggressively everything that he was saying. Then, when the immigrant's lawyers from the ACLU and elsewhere stood up to speak, they basically kept saying, “We already agree with you, you don't really need to keep saying this.”
Here is just one of the exchanges, courtesy of C-SPAN, which broadcast the hearing, that's where I listened to it, of this Trump appointee, Justin Walker, as he essentially sides with the Venezuelans about the right to due process. And by the way, this is one of the lawyers for the Venezuelan immigrants who are describing why due process is so urgent here. Then you'll hear the judge interject
Video. Hon. Justin Walker, C-SPAN. March 24, 2025.
This is the crux of the case. Their only argument is look, we don't dispute the government's right to deport people in the country illegally, we don't even dispute their right to imprison people if they're part of a criminal gang or an organization designated as a terrorist organization. What we're arguing is that the people accused before they get thrown away into a foreign country and disappear forever in one of the worst prison systems in the world, for life, or indefinitely, have to have the right before they're put there to appeal to a court and say, “We want a hearing to demonstrate that the accusation against us is false.” And the judge on the panel, who's a Trump appointee, interjected and said, “I don't know why you keep talking about this because there's no dispute from this bench that every single person that they propose to deport to El Salvador has the right to an Article III hearing before they're deported where the evidence has to be considered.”
Just by the way, last week, my friends Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball, the co-host of “Breaking Points,” had a quite vociferous debate, twice in fact, about this issue with Krystal arguing against these deportations to El Salvador and Saagar arguing in favor. I listened to both, I went and talked to Saagar, and explained to him my reasons why I thought he was wrong.
To his immense credit, he asked me to come on the show, where I could basically yell at him and tell him why he's wrong and he actually during the conversation we had, even before, was starting to say, “You know what, maybe I'm being convinced, I'm understanding these arguments better now,” he kind of said. I am very emotional about illegal immigration like a lot of people are and I just want the problem solved but it is true we can't violate the Constitution or basically process the right to do it and to his great credit, he invited me on, to the playful title that Breaking Point put up was Glenn Greenwald's schools Saagar on deportation.
A lot of people thought that that was the staff passive-aggressively rebelling against Saagar. In fact, he was the one who wrote it, knowing that that would bring a lot of traffic to the segment, but we did hash it out. Ryan Graham was there as well for about 25 minutes and kind of at the end, Saagar said, “You know what, I feel like I'm probably wrong on this issue. I'm starting to understand why this can't be that you can just throw people into an El Salvadorean prison with no opportunity for them to say that I've been wrongly accused of being part of a drug gang.” Otherwise, the president could just pick up anybody.
Anyway, I recommend the “Breaking Points” debate I did earlier today because a lot of these issues are really hashed out.
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I see a lot of Trump supporters arguing that district court judges should not have the power to make decisions that bind the entire federal government, the president, the executive branch; nobody elected them, etc., etc. As I said earlier, the Trump supporters, the conservative movement, frequently went into federal court under every democratic administration for decades, including Joe Biden's, and asked a single federal judge in a single federal district to enjoin, to stop Biden’s policy, not for just one district, but for the entire country and they often succeeded in getting it. No conservative back then ever said, “Oh, federal district court judges don't have the right to stop U.S. government policy” because, again, if you want to sue the U.S. government and get an injunction, stop them from doing something you believe is illegal or unconstitutional, you have to go to a federal district court. That's the only one that can rule in the first instance. If the government thinks that the injunction is wrong, the solution is not to ignore it but to appeal. That's how the rule of law functions.
There's this other narrative that the judges who are ruling against the Trump administration are all left-wing judges. They're all leftists carrying out a political agenda and a political war against Trump. So, this is the On Data and Democracy, which compiled data that reveals:
Measured Resistance: Data Reveals Cross-Ideological Judicial Opposition to Trump Administration
The cross-ideological judicial pushback challenging Trump’s narrative. (On Data and Democracy. March 20, 2025.)
They have both liberal and conservative judges ruling against Trump, two of the four judges targeted for impeachment are actually right of center. You will see a lot of these people for Trump here, conservatives for Trump, who have been ruling against him and you'll see Judge Boasberg, who again is being called a far-leftist, even though his judicial history doesn't remotely suggest anything like that, other judges as well, who are more to the conservative side. The percentage ruling against Trump by judicial ideology. So, this is by no means a far-left attack on the Trump administration. This is something that the judiciary is reacting to.
Remember, the Trump administration, the Trump movement, and this is part of what I liked about it, vowed that they were going to go in and completely break the way things are being done. So, it is, I think, expected that judges are going to be giving more scrutiny to brand new ways of doing things.
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Here is David Sacks, who I know very well and have a lot of respect for. He's been a very knowledgeable, important and influential opponent of the war in Ukraine, among other things. I think he's really been influenced by a lot of the voices that we have on our show, Professor Mearsheimer and that kind of realist school that is opposed to intervention. But he is now part of the Trump administration. He's Trump's czar for crypto and artificial intelligence. And he said this on X earlier today:
I just told you Trump celebrating a federal district court judge doing exactly that, invalidating an executive branch action, but remember the case that we talked about a lot where the Biden administration was coercing and pressuring Big Tech to censor dissent on a whole range of issues, including COVID? And the Biden Administration lost in the federal court, district court level. Conservative attorneys general for Missouri and Louisiana went and by the administration and asked the federal district court judge to enjoin that program, preventing the government from doing what they were doing with coercing Big Tech. The same David Sacks who just said the government would collapse if federal district court judges can override executive policy, the country would fall apart, was celebrating this because, like myself, he found the censorship regime to be so offensive to the Constitution and American values.
Here's what he posted on X in July 2023:
Conservatives constantly got federal support judges to enjoin democratic administrations.
I understand there are more such injunctions now, but that's because there are more Trump executive orders now. And Trump is not a status quo president. He's a status-quo-breaking president in a lot of ways. But if you want to complain, complain about the number. The principle cannot be challenged, which is that a federal district court judge has the right to issue nationwide injunctions, stopping a presidential policy. They always have had that power, both sides have used that power and celebrated it repeatedly. And now suddenly they want to create a new principle that federal district court judges should not have this power because it's Donald Trump now in office and they don't want to see him constrained in any way. That is anything but a principled or a constitutional-based argument.
Watch this segment here.
We could spend literally everyday documenting and announcing new Israeli atrocities in Gaza. There are all kinds of reporters who have covered wars for 30 years and aid organizations that have done so as well, who have said they have never seen destruction and indiscriminate killing of the kind that Israel has been doing in Gaza, you know all the statistics about the tens of thousands of children killed, 92% of all buildings destroyed or rendered completely compromised. It's essentially just turning Gaza into a parking lot, which a lot of Israelis at the beginning said and I was told, “Oh, don't listen to them. They're fringe voices, they're nothing but fringe voices.” That's exactly what the Israeli government planned to do, while at the same time they were cutting off food, water, electricity and medicine. So that things like amputations or surgeries without anesthesia on children became necessary because of those blockades, as well as malnutrition and mass starvation.
Earlier today, the Israeli military targeted and then killed two young journalists in separate attacks in Gaza. Here from ANTIWAR.COM:
Israeli Military Kills Two More Journalists in Separate Attacks in Gaza
Israeli strikes killed Hossam Shabat, a reporter for Al Jazeera, and Mohammad Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today TV (ANTIWAR.COM. March 24, 2025.)
We've had a young Palestinian journalist on our program who is a correspondent for Drop Site News, the outlet founded by my former colleagues and my friends Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill that has been doing excellent coverage on the war in Gaza. He's Abubaker Abed, who you probably remember. He's 22, speaks fluent English and wanted to go into journalism before this whole thing started because he wanted to report on his favorite sport, which is soccer, only to have watched many, if not most members of the Palestinian soccer team killed over the last year and a half or so. And three days ago, or two days ago, he disappeared from the internet. People got very worried. It turns out he was suffering from severe malnutrition.
There's no death worse than when your body starts shutting down because of hunger, starving to death is the most painful death there is. I was so impressed by him, he knows the danger of what he's doing. He continues to do it anyway.
But another journalist, a young journalist, who's 24 Hossam Shabat is somebody I've been following very closely over the last 15 months to get the news about what's happening in Gaza. There are no foreign journalists allowed in. So, we have to rely on Gaza and Palestinian journalists where we have no idea what's taking place in Gaza, except what the IDF would tell us, which is the opposite of reliable.
Hossam Shabat, the 24-year-old journalist who's been reporting every day on the destruction in Gaza was driving the car today, the IDF targeted his car, dropped a bomb on it or a drone pulled up the car and killed him instantly. And he was also a colleague of Drop Site. He had written messages at Drop Site, and he knew his life was in danger. Everyone in Gaza is in danger. It's a country of 2 million people and at least 60,000 have died, at least – every organization that says that's an undercount. So, about 3%, 4%, or 5% of the population extinguished with no end in sight.
Being a journalist, in particular, has been extra dangerous because Israel targets journalists because they are dangerous to Israel: they show the world what the Israelis are doing. And so, Hossam had prepared a message, I don't know exactly when, but that he had asked his colleagues and his family to post if he was killed. And because he was killed, they now posted it. Here's what it says:
Western journalists love to herald themselves as brave and heroic. Jim Acosta wrote that notorious book where he depicted himself as some sort of martyr constantly in danger because telling the truth in the air about Trump was so dangerous and the only thing that ever happened to him in his entire career was Trump said a few insulting side remarks about him.
This is actual courage: you're 24 years old, you have a stream of death threats from the IDF saying if you continue to do this reporting, we're going to kill you, you've seen hundreds of journalists in Gaza be targeted with death, and yet you continue do the work knowing that it's so likely that you're going to be targeted with death that you actually prepare a statement ahead of time knowing that it is likely to be released in the event that you are killed.
I don't even need to tell you what Israel's defense is: “These are all terrorists and Hamas operatives.” As we see with everything in Columbia, if you protest the Israeli war in Gaza, if you denounce it, if you're an effective critic of Israel, automatically you're a terrorist and you're pro-Hamas. That's what those terms mean.
Here was the IDF October 23, 2024, just about five months ago: “Documents Expose 6 Al Jazeera Journalists as Terrorists in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad Terror Organizations” (Israel Defense Forces. October 23, 2024.)
And one of the people they listed was Hossam Shabat. There you see the six journalist and he is in the lower left-hand corner.
There have been very few Western journalistic outlets objecting to any of this, even though in every other instance they would, you may remember that a Wall Street Journal reporter was detained in Russia for about nine months and they never stopped talking about it, and I don't blame them for that. That’s their duty, especially the Wall Street Journal’s, and he was released. Tuck Carlson went to interview Putin and spent the last 10 minutes of the interview badgering Putin to release him.
Journalists do that. They stand up for other journalists. Very few though have stood up for the Gazan journalists who have been targeted and killed by Israel for obvious reasons. People are very afraid to criticize Israel in the United States. The Committee to Protect Journalists, though, has done so somewhat and here is what they released today:
Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
As of March 24, 2025, CPJ’s preliminary investigations showed at least 173 journalists and media workers were among the more than tens of thousands killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992. (Committee to Protect Journalists. March 24, 2025.)
So, more journalists killed in this conflict since 1992 – since they've been counting.
Tammy Bruce is the spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, replacing Matthew Miller, though sounding awful like him, especially when it comes to Israel, and we have the video where she was asked today about the killing of these two journalists. Essentially, every time Israel does something horrific – kills aid workers, foreign aid workers, people with the U.N. and this is going back to the Biden administration as well – the State Department will say, “Oh yeah, we really regretted it. It's absolutely terrible. It's so tragic. Yes, it's being done with our money and our weapons.” But even though Israel is the one who keeps killing these people, it's all the fault somehow of Hamas. Here's what she said today:
Video. Tammy Bruce, US Department of State. March 24, 2025.
I think one of the most repulsive things that I hear when I see the U.S. government under Biden and now Trump, justifying every single thing Israel does by appealing to this “never again” slogan, is that they seem to think that ‘never again’ means, or that the war crimes conventions created after World War II mean and cover only Jews; that from now on you can't touch a hair on the head of a Jew because Never Again means that will never happen and war crimes were created only to protect Jews from what happened in the Holocaust.
If you go back and look at the Nuremberg trials where they punished and killed Nazi war criminals, all the prosecutors in the United States and from other allied countries, the judges all said, “What we're doing here will only matter, will only be just if the principles we're creating apply to every single country in the future, including the ones who are part of the prosecution.”
This did not mean that any violence against Jews suddenly invoked the horrors of the Holocaust. Other people can impose war criminality and mass slaughter, not just people who do so to Jews, and actually a Jewish state can do that as well.
The idea that, “Oh, everything was so nice and wonderful and peaceful in this region until Hamas attacked on October 7,” killing 800 civilians and the rest of IDF soldiers and armed agents of the state, if that's the thing that you focus, that one-day killing of 800 civilians versus the 60,000 who have died in Gaza at least, the targeting of journalists, the slaughter of children, the destruction of all of the infrastructure, that you only go back to that one-day because everything was so peaceful when Hamas attacked when in reality Israel had bombed Gaza repeatedly throughout 2023, before October 7, just like they did in 2022, and 2021, and 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2014 on a remarkable level, – not what competes with this, but the Israelis have been bombing the crap out of the Palestinians for decades, blockading them, keeping them tracked in Gaza brutally occupying the West Bank. Believing that this war started on October 7 is like propaganda, like the war in Ukraine began in February 2022 when the Russians invaded, and nothing ever happened of any kind of hostility before that.
But to stand there and “Hey, you just killed two young journalists by targeting them.” Isn't that a war crime? Say, “All I care about is October 7” and that whatever Israel does, they can go and slaughter as many babies as they want, we're gonna blame Hamas and we're gonna keep paying for Israel's war, we're going to keep arming them to do all of this.
I don't know what happened to America First, by the way. You would think America First would mean like, hey, we're not going to give billions and billions and billions of dollars to Israel, we’ll instead spend it at home on our own citizens. Remember all of that? And they're cutting aid to every foreign country they can find except for Israel. It sounds like anything but America First to me.
Besides what they did in Gaza with these two young journalists, in the West Bank, where there has been an amount of violence and destruction – burning people's homes down, expelling them from their land – while the whole world recognizes the West Bank not as Israel, but as belonging to the Palestinians, but obviously Israel doesn't care about international law because it has the largest, richest, and most powerful country and history in the United States fully in captive to it, fully paying for it, fully arming it, fully protecting it, why would they have to worry?
They have been open about the fact that they're looking not just to expel Palestinians from Gaza, but also from the West Bank. They want that land for themselves. They already occupy larger and larger parts of Syria and Lebanon. It's just a layman's realm that they are seeking.
In the West Bank, as you probably know, there was a film that was produced by an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian living in the West Bank that was designed to document the apartheid treatment of the West Bank by illustrating the vastly different rights that this Israeli Jew has versus this Palestinian in the west bank.
It was a documentary, “The Other Land,” that won the Oscar just a couple of months ago for Best Documentary. It hasn't found American distribution because theaters are afraid to show it when a theater in Miami Beach said that they were going to show it, the mayor tried to cancel the lease of the theater as punishment for showing this film even though it won an Oscar because it reflects poorly on Israel. Israel hates this film. Obviously, the Israeli who produced it has done something very courageous, but so has the Palestinian producer, knowing how Israel would react.
One of the producers of this film today – who actually won the award itself because when a documentary wins the Academy Award, the producers of the films are the ones who actually get the Oscar, so he's the one who got the Oscar – was attacked brutally and practically lynched by Israeli settlers who have just occupied land that doesn't belong to them and they keep occupying it with the encouragement and protection of the Israeli government and the Israeli military and he was essentially very close to being killed. I think his life is still at risk.
So, the idea that this Palestinian who just won an Oscar for a film critical of Israel ended up getting attacked by Israeli settlers and then, in the ambulance, the IDF dragged him out and arrested him and he disappeared is the level where we're at with Israel.
I just want to make one last point, which is that RFK Jr., who I had on my show when he was a candidate running for the Democratic primary, and whose health agenda I was largely supportive of, got into office, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. I was a strong advocate for his confirmation, and he had an agenda called “Make America Healthy Again.” There was a long list of important and impressive but difficult achievements he hoped to accomplish, things like combating chronic disease among Americans and child obesity, waging war on the regulatory capture by Big Pharma and Big Ag, forcing the removal of dangerous additives in the American food supply that don't exist anywhere else, re-examining and subjecting to much greater scrutiny certain medications that have been approved by a process that was sketchy because of how the pharmaceutical company, Big Pharma.
Here's what RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, posted earlier this month:
Such an Orwellian post because of the way the Trump administration is dealing with what they call antisemitism on college campuses, trying to eliminate bigotry, as though that can be done just like Democrats tried to eliminate racism, and are doing so by forcing universities to implement much more rigid speech codes, much more expanded definitions of antisemitism that outlaw a whole variety of common critiques of Israel.
For RFK Jr. to define that as an advancement of free speech and battling censorship on college campuses when it actually is censorship on college campuses was unbelievably ironic. But the fact that the first, one of the first public announcements he made as Secretary of Health and Human Services had nothing to do with the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda that I just described, spoke volumes.
And then he went back to X earlier today to make an announcement, again, not about childhood obesity or chronic disease or Big Ag or Big Pharma, or anything. This is what he said instead:
One of the things Columbia was forced to agree to was to adopt a radically expanded definition of antisemitism, the kind that they already have adopted in the EU that prevents you from saying Israel is a racist endeavor. You can say that about the United States, China, Peru or any other country in the world, just not about Israel. You're not allowed to observe that certain American Jews like, say, Ben Shapiro or Bari Weiss, just to pick two random examples, seem to have greater loyalty to Israel than the United States. That's one of the things that's now barred as antisemitism to say. You're not allowed to criticize Israel in a way that suggests you're applying a double standard to it, meaning you criticize Israel, but don't hold other countries to that same, that too is antisemitism.
You're not allowed to compare what the Israeli government is doing to the crimes of the Nazis, even though the whole purpose of the Nuremberg trials was to use that as a historical precedent to blow the whistle and to alert people to similar crimes. That is not allowed.
You can say that about the United States, you can say the United States are acting like Nazis, you can say the Russians are, you can say the Ukrainians are, or you can say the British are. Pick whatever country you want and say that about them. Feel free. Have a party calling it racist, comparing it to not just not this one country – that you are not allowed to do because now the Trump administration is demanding the application of more rigid speech codes to protect a particular minority and to eliminate bigotry after mocking the left and Democrats and liberals for doing exactly that for every other single minority group for a full decade.
It just shows you the obsession of the U.S. government with this single foreign country. I mean, it's one thing for Marco Rubio to do it, or Elise Stefanik to do it, or National Security officials to do it. It's still kind of weird that they're so obsessed with Israel, but at least they're talking about their actual jobs. RFK is the Health and Human Services Secretary; he excited so many people based on an agenda having to do with American health. However, twice now, the very few public pronouncements he's made, it's both been about antisemitism on college campuses, the need to curb it, and the October 7 holocaust.
At some point, I mean, it's already happening, but at some point, Americans are going to really start asking, why does Israel play such a vital central role? Why is the U.S. government constantly talking about it? Why is it sending billions of dollars a year to that foreign country? Why are they making special rules just for this one group of people and just of those foreign countries?
If you're worried about antisemitism, this is what's going to fuel it. Telling people that they're now outlawed from criticizing Israel, telling them that they are not allowed to talk about Israel, that every criticism they raise is antisemitic, telling them they have to send billions and billions of dollars a year to Israel, even after the Trump administration and the MAGA movement was all about let's stop giving our money to foreign countries and keep it here and spend it on our own country's welfare, at some point that's going to be realized.
It already is. The approval rating for Israel is at its lowest point ever in the history of Gallup polling and we showed you that two weeks ago. Watching even these kinds of ancillary cabinet members in the Trump administration, with nothing to do with foreign policy, continuously make pronouncements to serve Israel and show how concerned they are about it, is just further fueling the fire that's going to lead to people, rightfully so, asking why this foreign country has such a grave hold on our politics on a bipartisan basis and why it is that even every day you turn the internet, you see them blowing up children, blowing up journalists, blowing up buildings, destroying all of society, occupying multiple countries, bombing multiple countries all with American weapons and American money. Why it is that the United States is so blindly devoted to this foreign country and why do American politicians seem to have a much greater willingness to criticize our own government than this foreign government on the other side of the world?
