#us doj

An email buried in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein files has set India’s political gossip mills ablaze, and rightly so. The documents published by the US Department of Justice reportedly contain a line that links India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to an Epstein-related note about meetings and travel in 2017. The Ministry of External Affairs has flatly called the reference “nonsense” and warned against taking a convicted trafficker’s notes at face value. Fair enough, but silence or dismissal is not the same as an explanation.

If an American dossier mentions a sitting prime minister, citizens deserve straight answers: what exactly appears in the email, who wrote it, and why was it flagged? A flimsy “it’s rubbish” statement from the ministry looks like PR triage, not forensic clarity. Either the note is baseless trash from a disgraced criminal’s notebook, or it’s an item that needs contextual explanation from the PMO, not spin.

Ask plainly: Will the PM clarify the email’s context? Will the government publish the relevant passages, or at least let an independent panel verify them? Democracy survives on transparency, not soundbites. Treating a global leak as a punchline lets rumours fester; answering it honestly would shut them down. 

The U.S. Army has told units to prepare for deployment at the U.S.-Mexico border in the next 24 to 48 hours.

Trump declared a 'state of emergency' at the border, despite the fact that we have a fully staffed border patrol and we are not in a wartime footing with Mexico.

National Science Foundation freezes grants in response to Trump executive orders

Native Americans concerned that they may be rounded up in mass deportation efforts due to racial profiling

Trump states that GAZA should be 'swept clean' and over one million refugees to be moved to Egypt and Jordan. (these countries have refused by the way)

Trump also mentions that Gaza has 'great beachfront property' and his son in law Jared Kushner, a friend of Netanyahu since childhood, has made the same statements that Gaza would be great place to build condos (and not for Palestinians)

Despite a 'cease fire' attacks have continued in Gaza, many by settler groups with police esorts, as soon as Trump lifted Biden era sanctions on settler incursions.

some USAID officials were put on leave for not abiding Trump's order to halt all international aid.

Trump has placed all Diversity and Inclusion federal employees across agencies on paid leave for 30 days until their positions are terminated.

The US Air Force took down a video for new recruits showcasing the Tuskegee Airmen, a famous all black fighting force from WW2, as well as the WAVES, women who joined the service during WW2.

The advisory office of DOGE now run solely by Elon Musk, a US government contractor puts him in nominal charge of government programs, a conflict of interest, however he has been booted from an office next to Trump in the White House to another building.

This Department of Government Efficiency now is taking over the US Digital Service in charge of all US gov websites, including the new IRS Free File (where you can do your taxes online for free, a holdover from the Biden Administration.)

Trump is paving the way for the Pentagon to remove transgender service members

The Quaker faith have taken the Trump administration to court over a new policy to enter churches and religious spaces in mass deportation efforts.

Trump puts hold on refugees - hundreds of thousands of people fleeing strife in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Haiti and Venezuela have been stopped from entering the US - the program was bipartisan and many have waited years in a legal process to enter.

Trump has revoked a Biden admin program that allowed 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans and nearly 1 million migrants allowed into the country through an app called CBP One, all of these individuals are now targeted for deportation.

Vice President Vance complained when U.S. Catholic bishops condemned ICE entering places of employment, churches and schools in mass deportation raids (lifting an Obama era restriction)

Vice President Vance states that Big Tech is too powerful in the US, at the same time Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg, along with other 'tech bros' were featured at Trump's inauguration, seated in front of his cabinet picks.

Trump fires DOJ employees who worked on Trump's prosecution for insurrection on Jan 6 as well as his stolen US government 'eyes only' documents. Republicans are investigating the bi-partisan Jan 6th investigations under the Biden administration.

Harry Litman at The New Republic:

Of the many ways that Donald Trump, abetted by the U.S. Supreme Court, has laid waste to the executive branch and ransacked civil society, one Trump target above all others requires our constant vigilance and hair-trigger sensitivity. That is federal elections—and the prospect that Trump will try to achieve in pseudo-legal fashion what he failed to accomplish through brute force after the 2020 election he lost to President Biden. Democracy can weather a lot of damage and unlawful conduct at Trump’s hands, but if he succeeds in taking control of the machinery of elections, it could be a fatal blow. That’s why a barely noticed story in The New York Times last week was so worrisome. As reported by the Times, unidentified senior administration officials have directed DOJ lawyers to explore the possibility of federal criminal charges against state or local election officials deemed to have failed to adequately safeguard computer systems.

Tellingly, the initiative isn’t grounded in any new evidence, data, or legal theory. It’s not about truth or justice. It’s a political and ideological ploy, reportedly incubated in the Project 2025 workshop—part of Trump’s broader effort to delegitimize democratic institutions and seize autocratic control. I’ve often said the best way to unravel a Trump scheme is to start with the lie that always forms its foundation. That’s not hard here: It’s the same, repeatedly discredited but inexhaustibly pressed canard that elections are rife with fraud, including votes cast by undocumented immigrants. It’s bogus. The 2020 and 2024 elections were remarkably secure, and there’s no reason to suspect 2026 and 2028 will be any different.

The lie of widespread voter fraud has been exhaustively debunked. More than 60 court cases, state audits, and bipartisan election officials confirmed 2020 was secure. Even Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called it “the most secure in American history.” But with Trump, the goal isn’t to advance facts—much less convince a court. It’s to inject fear and chaos into our institutions and force them to lean in to his advantage. And there’s no real counterweight—only the abstract values of truth and institutional integrity, left to fend for themselves.

Poll workers are traditionally civic-minded, mild-mannered citizens doing their part for democracy—a necessary and fairly thankless part. In 2020, hundreds of thousands of Americans undertook the mitzvah of staffing the polls. Many were elderly—your neighbor, your church usher, your grandma. Many were first-timers. These weren’t political operatives; they were regular people from the bedrock of their communities. They did it because they believed in the process. [...]

Now, with the backing of a major-party nominee and the muscle of right-wing media, Trump is threatening to turn that isolated smear campaign into standard operating procedure. The message is simple: Help run an election that Trump loses, and we will come for you. And, tragically, it may be working. Across the country, election officials have resigned in droves. Offices that were once nonpartisan and low-profile have become hotbeds of threats and suspicion. Trump has already browbeaten major law firms and entire universities into submission. The sad truth of recent months is that key pillars of civil society—law firms, universities, and more—often crumble under Trump’s pressure campaigns, no matter how baseless they are in law or fact.

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Holy shit, y’all...it’s goin’ down!!!!  YES!!!!!!!

READ THE WHOLE THREAD!  THE FACT THAT THE DOJ IS CALLING IT “WAR” CLEARS THE WAY FOR TREASON CHARGES!!!!!!

Duke University’s attempt to fend off an antitrust lawsuit by hiding under UNC’s cloak of governmental immunity looks like one of the few things that can inspire bipartisanship in Washington these days.

On March 7, lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice filed a “statement of interest” in radiologist Danielle Seaman’s class-action lawsuit against Duke, which alleges that the university’s and UNC-Chapel Hill’s medical schools colluded to reduce competition for doctors and other key personnel.

While the case hasn’t gone to trial, the Trump administration’s Justice Department said that “if the evidence proves that Duke and [the UNC School of Medicine] entered into a naked no-poach agreement, the court should not hesitate to declare it per se unlawful.”

The filing came little more than a year after the agency affirmed that it would stand behind an Obama-era memo that said even a “gentlemen’s agreement” between rival schools to restrict faculty hiring raids would violate federal antitrust law.

Seaman, formerly an assistant professor in Duke’s School of Medicine, sued in 2015 after she lost out on a comparable position at UNC.  Court filings indicate that she wanted to switch jobs not so much for the money but because she thought UNC would be a better fit for her interests and goals.

An administrator at UNC, however, emailed back to say a few-years-old agreement between the deans of the medical schools ruled out “lateral moves” between them.  A professor could make the jump if the new job came with a promotion, but a like-for-like switch of, say, an assistant professorship at Duke for an assistant professorship at UNC was out of bounds.

With that email in hand, Seaman sought legal help from a San Francisco law firm that was then in the midst of extracting a $415 million settlement from such Silicon Valley giants as Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel, which were accused of having similar under-the-table no-poach deals.  She sued Duke, then later added UNC to the case.  Under questioning, the then dean of UNC’s medical school, Bill Roper — now interim president of the UNC system — admitted to Seaman’s lawyers that he’d warned subordinates about hiring from Duke and that he’d sought a no-raids agreement from Victor Dzau, who was then Duke’s health-affairs chancellor.

UNC settled, agreeing to cooperate with Seaman’s lawyers, to avoid future hiring collusion, and to train its senior staff on antitrust law.  Duke, however, has maintained that there was never any agreement.  It has pointed to several examples of professors switching jobs.

But Duke’s primary legal argument — offered in hopes of avoiding a trial — has been that UNC’s governmental immunity shields private-sector actors like itself that cooperate with UNC initiatives and policy.

Not so fast, the DOJ says.

“Duke’s expansive arguments on the ‘state action’ doctrine and indulgent treatment of no-poach agreements are not supported by precedent and risk significant harm to competition, consumers, and workers in North Carolina,” its brief said.

UNC isn’t necessarily exempt from antitrust law because it’s participating in the market as an employer, not as a regulator, the department’s lawyers argue.

They added that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 2015 ruling that roiled North Carolina’s dentistry-regulation system — the court found that, because the state’s licensing board was composed of people active in the profession, it could only claim immunity from antitrust law when it was actively supervised by the state — altered the relevant legal doctrines in ways Duke’s lawyers haven’t grappled with.

Duke’s problem now is that there’s no sign that state legislators, in allowing UNC to manage its affairs, intended to allow it to collude with others to suppress labor-market competition, according to the DOJ brief.

And because of the 2015 Supreme Court case, for any sort of immunity to exist, UNC officials would have to be actively supervising the no-poach deal.  But since “Duke denies the agreement occurred, [it] cannot credibly argue that the agreement was actively supervised.”

The Obama-era memo, issued in October 2016, didn’t cite the Duke case but posed a similar hypothetical.  A DOJ spokeswoman said in February 2018 that the department still regards that memo as good law.

The head of the DOJ’s antitrust section, Makan Delrahim, has also signaled that his staff will likely file briefs in hiring-collusion cases around the country and perhaps pursue criminal prosecutions.

Duke spokesman Michael Schoenfeld says the university wouldn’t comment on the DOJ’s filing.

Ray Gronberg is a former Durham Herald-Sun reporter who is now managing editor of The Henderson Daily Dispatch. Comment on this story at [email protected].