In a sweeping move, President Donald Trump ousted at least a dozen inspectors general on Friday night, purging major federal agencies of independent watchdogs tasked with identifying fraud and abuse. A federal law enacted in 2022 stipulates that the president must give Congress at least 30 days notice before firing an inspector general, as well as reasons for the firing—none of which occurred.

“It’s a purge of independent watchdogs in the middle of the night,” posted Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on X. “Inspectors general are charged with rooting out government waste, fraud, abuse, and preventing misconduct. President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”

The inspectors general received an email from the White House saying their positions had been terminated “due to changing priorities.” The number of ousted inspectors is yet unclear, with reports ranging from at least 12 to about 17. The Washington Post and New York Times report that agencies whose watchdogs were removed include the departments of defense, state, transportation, labor, health, commerce, interior, and veterans affairs, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Small Business Administration. Some of those ousted include Trump appointees from the president’s first term.

The system of inspectors general dates back to 1978, after the Watergate scandal, when Congress enacted legislation to install independent watchdogs within federal agencies to conduct investigations and audits and report their findings to the public. Today, there are 74 inspectors general, 36 of whom are presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed.

Pete Hegseth was sworn in as defense secretary on Saturday morning after a confirmation process mired in allegations of sexual assault, public drunkenness, and the financial mismanagement of two veterans’ advocacy groups.

Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate on Friday night after three Republicans—former GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—voted against the nomination. It was the second time in history that the vice president has cast the tie-breaking vote for a Cabinet nominee.

Hegseth, a former Fox News host and military veteran, promised to overhaul the “woke” policies of the department and restore a “warrior culture.” The Department of Defense operates an $850 billion budget and employs more than 3 million military and civilian personnel.

In a blistering statement, McConnell said, “The restoration of ‘warrior culture’ will not come from trading one set of culture warriors for another.” He added, “By all accounts, brave young men and women join the military with the understanding that it is a meritocracy. This precious trust endures only as long as lawful civilian leadership upholds what must be a firewall between service members and politics.” His vote marks one of the first times since the January 6 insurrection that the former majority leader has been so outspoken in his opposition to Trump’s agenda.

In 2020, Blossom Old Bull was raising three teenagers on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Her youngest son, Braven Glenn, was 17, a good student, dedicated to his basketball team.

That November, Old Bull got a call saying Glenn was killed in a police car chase that resulted in a head-on collision with a train. Desperate for details about the accident, she went to the police station, only to find it had shut down without any notice.  

“The doors were locked. It looked like it wasn’t in operation anymore—like they just upped and left,” Old Bull said. “It’s, like, there was a life taken, and you guys just closed everything down without giving the family any answers?”

This kicks off a yearslong search to find out what happened to Glenn and how a police force could disappear overnight without explanation. This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels’ investigation into the crash is at once an examination of a mother’s journey to uncover the details of her son’s final moments and a sweeping look at a broken system of tribal policing. 

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As President Donald Trump’s first week in office comes to a close, his biggest accomplishments are things many of us anticipated: chaos and confusion.

Some of the many executive orders the president has signed do threaten democracy and others endanger the planet. But others simply endorse hypothetical policies with more spectacle than is necessary, like printing out tweets on paper, signing them with a black Sharpie, and holding them up for the world to see.

The challenge there, of course, is that only legal scholars know at first glance which of Trump’s executive orders will affect policy — and which will get stuck in court for years to come. Nevertheless, the pieces of paper scare and confuse people. And that confusion will hang around, holding up actual progress for a meaningful amount of time. Trump’s first assault on the fictional electric vehicle “mandate” serves as a perfect example of this strategy.

Hours after taking the oath of office, Trump signed an executive order with the cinematic title “Unleashing American Energy.” In it, he outlines several new policies to, as the title implies, “unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources.” This is code for: Promote fossil fuel and hobble the renewable energy transition.

Pop culture is full of lovable orphans. There’s Annie, of course, and Harry Potter, and the Boxcar Children, and James (with the Giant Peach), and Cinderella—the list goes on and on. They have familiar stories: The protagonist loses parents and finds themselves in dire straits, typically under the supervision of evil caretakers. But through grit, wit, and, often, the help of a wealthy, generous benefactor—think Daddy Warbucks—they’re able to succeed.

When author Kristen Martin lost her own parents to cancer as a child, her experience as an orphan was nothing like that. There were no evil stepparents to outsmart before going on epic adventures. Relatives stepped in; the grief was consuming. The “utter disconnect,” she says, between her experience and those of pop culture protagonists was part of the inspiration for her book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood. 

Martin explores the history of orphanhood in America since the 1800s and its harsh reality today, coming to a striking conclusion: It is poverty—rather than the death of both parents—that has often led children to be deemed orphans. “The fact is,” Martin writes, “most of the children we’re talking about when we’re talking about orphans had one or two living parents but were separated from them, either voluntarily or involuntarily,” she writes. 

Despite the narrative that “we are a nation that values the nuclear family, rallies around children in need, and believes all young people have promising future,” in reality, “only some are deserving of strong familial ties.”

Chrystal Starbird, a cancer researcher at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, had been preparing to serve on her first National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant review panel at the end of January. On Wednesday, to her surprise, that meeting was abruptly canceled.

These NIH panels, or “study sections,” typically involve a group of about 20 to 30 scientists who meet to assess research grant proposals within their areas of expertise. Most of the grants, Starbird says, range from about $2 million to $10 million. Once the group reviews and scores the projects, a separate NIH “advisory council” decides which ones to fund.

The email Starbird received was vague. It came from her study section contact at NIH, within the Trump administration, and it said the multiday meeting, set for January 30 and 31, would not take place as planned. The message instructed her to save her files about the projects for the time being and thanked her for her service to the NIH. “I’ve never seen a complete pause like this as part of a transition,” she told me.

The “pause” goes beyond grant reviews. It appears to be part of a larger blackout on research at NIH and across the federal government. On Tuesday, as the Washington Post first reported, the Trump administration paused all external communications—”health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites and social media posts” at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was a top White House official during Trump’s first term. After exiting the White House in 2021, Kushner launched a new private equity firm, Affinity Partners, and announced he was seeking to raise $7 billion. Kushner had no experience in private equity, and his most significant business experience was nearly bankrupting his family’s real estate company.

Who would be interested in giving Kushner billions of dollars? Kushner raised $2 billion from the government of Saudi Arabia through its Public Investment Fund (PIF). The PIF committee that screens investments recommended rejecting Kushner’s proposal, citing “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management” and “excessive” fees.

The committee’s recommendation, however, was overruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), with whom Kushner formed a friendship during his time in the White House. Kushner helped MBS manage the fallout after United States intelligence agencies determined that MBS had ordered the brutal murder of the US-based journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. To date, Kushner has raised $4.6 billion, including additional funds from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

The Trump administration has snuffed out a plan to ban menthol cigarettes, handing a victory to the tobacco industry after it waged a massive and at times deceptive lobbying campaign.

The FDA proposed banning menthol cigarettes in 2022, amid pressure from groups including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Lung Association, and the NAACP, which noted that menthol cigarettes, long aggressively marketed to Black Americans, have a disproportionate and deadly effect on their health.

Tobacco allies argued banning menthol would be racist.

To fight the proposal, tobacco companies—in particular Reynolds American, which earns a big chunk of revenue from its mentholated Newport cigarette brand—turned that argument on its head, asserting that banning menthols would be racist because Black people tend to smoke them.

The anti-abortion movement has launched a pressure campaign urging President Donald Trump’s administration to take steps toward a nationwide ban on medication abortion, the method used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions nationwide.

On Wednesday, 30 leading anti-abortion activists sent a pair of letters to the acting heads of the Department of Justice and FDA, urging a multifaceted crackdown on abortion pills.

The letter to the Department of Justice takes aim at the distribution of mifepristone by mail. The FDA has allowed providers to mail mifepristone to patients since 2021, and the mail, of course, has been an important part of the supply chain for the medication for decades. But the letter, addressed to acting Attorney General James McHenry, asks him to take “immediate action” to implement the Comstock Act, the 19th-century anti-obscenity law that made it a crime to mail “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” The Biden administration interpreted the law to apply only to illegal abortions. And the Comstock Act has not been enforced for many decades, as I reported in 2023, when lawyers in the anti-abortion movement were increasingly raising the act in proposed local laws and legal filings:

In the past, the act was enforced by an army of postal inspectors who regularly peeked into people’s mail, screening letters and packages en masse for mentions of sex and contraception, [historian Lauren MacIvor] Thompson says. Today, though the statute is still on the books, a century of court decisions about privacy, freedom, and the First Amendment have rendered it dormant.

On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to restrict immigration, titled “Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” It has been described as a revival of his first-term Muslim “travel ban,” making good on a campaign promise to bring back the controversial rule.

Buried in the executive order is the fulfillment of another vow from the campaign: an attempt to find a way to easily deport pro-Palestine demonstrators. 

While much of the new order mimics the old Muslim “travel ban” Trump signed on the first day of his first term in 2017, this order is more neutral on its face. This time, Trump is not explicitly naming specific countries to target, but asking agencies to submit a report within 60 days outlining countries from which to suspend immigration. 

“Students are afraid of being labeled as terrorists, and now there’s more ammunition from this executive order to actually carry that out.” 

President Joe Biden has issued a flurry of pardons during his final days in office, beginning with his grant of clemency to his son Hunter and continuing with a mid-December announcement that he had pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 Americans. This week, Biden told reporters that he was still considering issuing preemptive pardons for high-profile Trump critics before the end of his term. Donald Trump, too, has indicated that he’ll make liberal use of pardons, saying he’ll grant clemency to January 6 insurrectionists on his first day in office.

As this week’s episode of Reveal makes clear, debates over the presidential power of pardon are nothing new. Today’s show features audio from an interview with Gerald Ford, aired for the first time by Reveal in 2019, in which the former president discussed his 1974 decision to pardon Richard Nixon. “I had a visceral feeling that the public animosity to Mr. Nixon was so great that there would be a lack of understanding, and the truth is that’s the way it turned out,” Ford said. “The public and many leaders, including dear friends, didn’t understand it at the time.”

Also on this week’s episode, Reveal reports on the thousands of Americans who have been waiting for a presidential pardon for years in the aftermath of the war on drugs. Listen to the show here:

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2019.

Former New York City mayor and Trump hanger-on Rudy Giuliani was found in contempt of court on Friday—for the second time in a week. Giuliani faces two different federal lawsuits against him stemming from his comments about a pair of Georgia elections workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, whom he falsely accused of helping rig the 2020 election. He has now been found in contempt of court in both cases and faces additional fines—on top of the $148 million he already owes the two women.

Shortly after the 2020 election, Giuliani falsely said that video footage of the Atlanta vote-counting site where Freeman and Moss—a mother and daughter employed as temporary election officials—were working showed the two women manipulating votes. The lies were later repeated by Donald Trump and spread around the Internet, leading to harassment and death threats against the pair. Freeman and Moss sued Giulani for defamation, and in 2023 a jury voted that he owed them $148 million in damages. Creditors later filed a second lawsuit against Giuliani for failing to cooperate in turning over the assets he owes.

On Monday, Giuliani was found in contempt of court in that second case, based in New York City, where the judge found that while Giuliani had turned over some assets, he had not been forthcoming with important paperwork needed to evaluate what other assets he must relinquish. The judge in that case ruled that Giuliani had “willfully violated a clear and unambiguous order of this court” when he “blew past” a December 20 deadline to provide certain paperwork.

On Friday, Beryl A. Howell, the Washington, D.C., judge in the original defamation case, found Giuliani in contempt because he has continued to defame Freeman and Moss, repeating lies about them even after he lost the original case. In May, Giuliani signed an agreement in which he said he agreed to stop repeating the falsehoods—a promise which he then broke in November with comments he made on his podcast.

The Supreme Court on Friday heard oral arguments on the future of TikTok—whether to let the platform go dark on January 19 according to a bipartisan law passed by Congress, or to intervene and spare the platform.

The case pits the First Amendment free speech rights of TikTok and its users against the government’s assertions that the platform poses a national security risk. With bipartisan support, Congress passed a law that will essentially ban TikTok in the United States on January 19 unless ByteDance, the Chinese-based company that owns TikTok, divests the platform.

Genuflecting to national security over fundamental rights has led to some of the court’s most regrettable decisions.

The Supreme Court does not generally like to second-guess the federal government when it comes to national security concerns, and is therefore likely to ultimately uphold the law. While the justices did express doubts about some of the government’s national security rationale, it’s unclear if there are strong enough to delay the law from taking effect, or to overturn it as an unconstitutional infringement on the right to free speech.

Los Angeles has been hit with its worst-ever wildfires, which continue to blaze, already claiming at least ten lives and devastating air quality—just as a spate of mask bans have been enacted or proposed around the country, including in LA itself.

Since authorities began issuing evacuation orders across the area, Joaquín Beltrán, a community organizer and software engineer, has been visiting centers to hand out masks. Beltrán still takes Covid-19 seriously, as do organizers with Mask Bloc LA, a mutual aid group that Beltrán linked up with, which has also been visiting evacuation shelters to hand out N95 and KN95 masks.

Personally handed out well over 1,000 respirators here at the Pasadena Convention Center to every person awake. @PasadenaGov @lapublichealth @RedCross, the people want to be protected from hazardous wildfire smoke. Please set up a system and supply respirators immediately. pic.twitter.com/C6OFzytjpr

For people involved in Covid mask organizing, handing out masks serves two purposes: protection from harmful wildfire smog and against infectious diseases. I spoke to Beltrán about his experience working to keep his community safe, even as this dual-purpose public health tool has become an increasingly villainized symbol of the culture wars.

Donald Trump’s criminal case ended with a sputter on Friday morning as a New York City judge sentenced him to no jail time and discharged his case. While the incoming president received no actual punishment for his 34 convictions for concealing hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, the sentencing did formalize his status as a felon—a first for any American president. Trump did not have to be present in court for the sentencing, but appeared by video from Mar-a-Lago, sitting next to his attorney.

“This defendant… has placed officers of the court in harm’s way.”

During the brief hearing, prosecutors said they agreed with the plan to not give Trump any jail time, but insisted he must be categorized as a felon. Joshua Steinglass of the Manhattan district attorney’s office told Judge Juan Merchan that a probation report produced for the sentencing described Trump as seeing himself above the law and refusing to take responsibility for his actions.

Steinglass argued that Trump, who appeared to either sleep or pretended to sleep for much of the trial, and who used his social media to direct vitriol at prosecutors, witnesses, and Merchan and his family, should not be allowed to walk away from his convictions without any formal recognition of his wrongdoing,

With Donald Trump less than two weeks away from taking office and promising an agenda of mass deportations, Democrats are poised to hand Republicans major new powers over immigration policy. Why? Still shell-shocked from the November results, they apparently fear their reelection prospects if they don’t.

The Laken Riley Act—named for the 22-year-old Georgia woman who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan migrant who was in the country illegally—passed the House with support from 48 Democrats earlier this week. Senators voted overwhelmingly in favor of advancing the bill on Thursday before potentially considering amendments and voting on the bill itself. The legislation would both mandate the detention of certain undocumented immigrants and make it easier for Republican attorneys general to sue the federal government over immigration matters—legal challenges that could then lead to sweeping decisions by right-wing judges.

Republicans do not have the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster in Senate on their own. But they may attract enough Democratic support to pass the bill. Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) have already signaled they will support the bill. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) told The Hill that she was “inclined” to support the bill as well.

The willingness of Democrats, particularly those in swing districts and states, to support the bill is a sign of how vulnerable many in the party now understand themselves to be on immigration. Instead of fighting Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, as they did during his first term, Democrats are increasingly willing to cave to it in the hopes of insulating themselves from future Republican attacks.  

The Supreme Court on Thursday narrowly denied President-elect Donald Trump’s last ditch effort to delay his sentencing in the New York hush money case in which he was convicted of 34 felony counts in May. That sentencing will now proceed tomorrow, January 10.

Trump was found guilty of falsifying business records to cover up payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The sentencing, as Judge Juan Merchan has already indicated, will not include prison time, a fine, or any condition of probation. But it will, officially, make Trump a convicted felon just 10 days before resuming office. Trump will still have the opportunity to appeal his conviction, and the Supreme Court might yet overturn it in the likely scenario the case is appealed to the highest court.

On multiple occasions, the Supreme Court has come to Trump’s aid. On Thursday, it stood down—at least for now.

Rather than intervene before Trump has exhausted his appeal opportunities in state court, the justices’ decision not to intervene allows the New York courts to handle the case as it would handle any other criminal proceeding. This decision is not a sign that the justices are skeptical of Trump’s legal demands or that they won’t later throw out his conviction. But the court—which has in the past year repeatedly taken extraordinary steps to protect Trump from legal liability—stood down. At least for now.

The ongoing Los Angeles wildfires have reportedly killed at least 5 people and destroyed thousands of structures, leaving entire neighborhoods in heaps of ashes. 

With stately homes burned to the ground, or too damaged to imminently return to, wealthy Angelenos reportedly fled to hotels or other cities: Those who could afford the nightly rate of more than $1,000 stayed at the posh Beverly Hills Hotel, according to a Wednesday night dispatch from the LA Times. Others, the New York Times reported, went to the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, where Thursday night’s cheapest rate was listed online at $512. Some drove the 30 miles southeast to the city of Anaheim, where several hotels are offering discounted stays. 

But the plight of people experiencing homelessness in the city—reportedly more than 45,000 as of last year, which marked a decrease from 2023—have been comparatively invisible in the wall-to-wall coverage. On Thursday afternoon, I called up John Maceri, the CEO of the People Concern, a social services organization in LA that oversees 700 shelter beds, to learn more about the barriers facing unhoused people trying to flee the wildfires. Their struggles, he said, range from lacking cell phones and Internet access, which can prevent them from learning about evacuation orders and resources, to coping with health issues from all the time spent outside inhaling wildfire smoke. With homelessness reaching record levels in the US last year and natural disasters increasing as a result of climate change, the challenges Maceri outlined seem less like anomalous hardships and more like harbingers of what’s to come as more Americans grapple with the dual housing and climate crises.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

For the last two mornings, I’ve woken up from broken sleep in my house on Los Angeles’ east side in a blind panic, the smell of smoke permeating the air. The light slanting in is a horrible, eerie orange, illuminating the white kitchen cabinets like a nightmare projection screen. When I climb onto the roof, the air in every direction is full of dark, low, menacing clouds fed by smoke, blocking out the mountains and trees even just a few miles away.

Every wildfire is accused of not being a wildfire, but a planned attack to further sinister ends.

Our car is packed. Our important documents are in a tote bag by the back door. Every ping from the Watch Duty app, which sends out real-time fire alerts, sends me scrambling for my phone. I’m anxiously scrutinizing the perimeter of the Eaton fire, which has destroyed the homes of friends and community landmarks I love, willing it not to jump the 134 highway, praying today will be the day that helitankers will be able to slow the spread. I watch helplessly as the other fires across town engulf homes, businesses, send pets and livestock fleeing alone, reduce lives and memories to ash. I pray the death toll doesn’t mount higher. I watch friends and acquaintances on Instagram reporting from where they’ve evacuated, haggard and blank-faced with shock in hotel rooms and packed cars. I don’t know what kind of city we’ll have waiting for us on the other side of this. 

Naturally, then, as a journalist who’s covered conspiracy theories and disinformation for many years, it’s been reassuring to learn that the disaster threatening my safety can be blamed on false flag attacks, Democrat plotting, the evils of diversity, and—say it with me—the Jews. A disaster is a ripe moment for conspiracy peddlers to ply their wares, and a historic series of fires threatening a major city—especially one filled with Democrats, non-white people and wealthy celebrities—has sent the machine into overdrive. The theories being spread about the Los Angeles fires, as Nitish Pahwa wrote yesterday, are a mix of climate change denialism and attempts to pin the disasters on their usual and preferred villains. Perhaps most disturbing of all, they also contain an ugly dose of celebration and schadenfreude. “The Hollywood Hills are on fire,” are burning, tweeted an account associated with the network of Stew Peters, a far-right and deeply antisemitic podcaster. “It’s almost poetic.”  

Weeks before the Supreme Court’s emergency session that could determine the fate of TikTok in the United States, Donald Trump on Friday issued a legal filing asking the high court to pause the law that would ban the Chinese-owned social media app if it isn’t sold by January 19.

The filing did not comment on the legal arguments of the law, which was signed under President Biden over national security concerns that have mounted in recent years. Instead, it touted Trump as “one of the most powerful, prolific, and influential users of social media in history,” noting his 14.7 million followers on TikTok. The president also echoed TikTok’s arguments that the law illegally restricts the First Amendment.

The filing marks the latest chapter in Trump’s shifting views regarding the popular app after he tried, and failed, to ban it in 2020. After meeting with TikTok’s CEO earlier this month, Trump hinted at possibly intervening before the law’s implementation, saying that he had a “warm spot” for the platform. In March, Trump experienced a similar reversal following a meeting with Jeff Yass, a conservative hedge-fund manager who happens to have a $33 billion stake in TikTok. All of this has come against the backdrop of Trump’s increasing coziness with some of tech’s most prominent billionaires.

D. John Sauer, Trump’s lawyer and nominee for solicitor general, wrote on Friday: “President Trump takes no position on the underlying merits of this dispute. Instead, he respectfully requests that the Court consider staying the Act’s deadline for divestment of January 19, 2025, while it considers the merits of this case, thus permitting President Trump’s incoming Administration the opportunity to pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in the case.”