'Quiet, piggy' an insult too far

 Rachel Leingang of the Guardian writes:

It’s one outrage in days full of outrageous material.

“Quiet, piggy,” Donald Trump told a female reporter in a press gaggle, pointing his finger at her angrily.

It wasn’t the first time – not even the hundredth time – the US president has attacked the media. And it’s hard for any storyline to break through the administration’s “flood the zone” strategy, much less one like this. Nothing seems to stick. But the “quiet, piggy” clip has taken off, several days after the admonishment occurred on Air Force One last Friday, and without much help from the media itself.

“I don’t know why the ‘Piggy’ thing is bothering me so much,” wrote Hank Green, a YouTuber and author. “It’s one more unforgivable thing in a list of 20,000 unforgivable things, but I’ve been mad about it for like 12 straight hours.”

Trump is going through a string of losses: Democrats dominating in off-year elections, having to reverse course on the Epstein files, Republicans refusing to get rid of the filibuster to end the shutdown, a faltering economy. There’s a possibility that he’s losing his air of impenetrability, and his grip on the right could maybe, just maybe, be loosening.

The anger he displayed in the clip could be a sign of someone on the back foot, overreacting to a question Bloomberg correspondent Catherine Lucey was asking about why Trump was fighting against releasing the Epstein files “if there’s nothing incriminating in the files”. The files related to the child sexual abuser released so far by Congress show that Epstein communicated regularly, and derogatorily, about women with a host of prominent friends.

Lashing out at a female reporter with a derogatory insult amid a news cycle dominated by politicians splitting hairs over a man who ran a sex-trafficking outfit – it was pretty on the nose.

But the clip also pinged around the internet in the same news cycle as Trump telling another female reporter it was rude to ask Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist whom the CIA determined was killed at the direction of the crown prince.

“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” Trump said of Khashoggi, responding to a question from ABC News’s Mary Bruce. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him, or didn’t like him, things happen. But he knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”

The combined force of two outbursts at female journalists in a single news cycle – for asking about a child sexual abuser and a murdered colleague – went beyond the standard-fare Trumpian attacks on the media.

Part of the collective ire could be that no one in the press gaggle jumped to Lucey’s defense in the video, underlining that those attacked by Trump often stand alone while others fear becoming next on his list; the media backbone that stiffened in his first term has wilted, under exhaustion and at the hands of Trump-friendly owners, in his second. The condemnations of Trump and accolades for both journalists came after the fact.

“These incidents are not isolated; they are part of an unmistakable pattern of hostility – often directed at women – that undermines the essential role of a free and independent press,” the Society of Professional Journalists said in a statement Wednesday.

The White House, meanwhile, has doubled down on the comment, saying Lucey had “behaved in an inappropriate and unprofessional way towards her colleagues on the plane”, providing no details on what that meant. “If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take,” they said.

Beyond the clip’s power to outrage, though, is a sign that the leftwing media ecosystem and its creators are starting to command attention and elevate stories that media outlets aren’t jumping on. As Democratic digital strategist Parker Butler pointed out on X, the “quiet, piggy” clip grabbed millions of views on online accounts four days after it happened, saying: “It got almost NO coverage when he said it … A viral post can shape an entire news cycle.”

And some Democrats who’ve taken the strategy of being Trump back to Trump, including California governor Gavin Newsom’s press office, are using the clip to bully the president back, Photoshopping Trump’s face onto pigs and repeatedly tweeting “quiet, piggy”.

In Trump 2.0, you never know which affronts to decency will stick in people’s minds. This one, though, has a symbolism that seems to be resonating.

“Portland has reclaimed the frog as a symbol of its resistance to Trump’s efforts to militarize the city,” former US attorney and commentator Joyce Alene wrote on X. “Perhaps women should claim the glamorous, sassy Muppet Miss Piggy, a known diva with a fierce karate chop, as their own symbol.”

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Florida carries out 17th execution of 2025

 The 44th Execution of 2025

Richard Barry Randolph convicted of raping and fatal beating his manager at a Florida convenience store in 1988 was put to death on November 20. 2025 in the state’s record 17th execution this year, reported The Associated Press.

Randolph, 63, was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. Randolph was convicted of murder, armed robbery, sexual battery and grand theft and sentenced to death in 1989 for the killing of Minnie Ruth McCollum.

The curtain to the death chamber went up exactly at 6:00 p.m., the scheduled execution time, and authorities began administering the drugs two minutes later after Randolph had no last words.

As the drugs flowed, Randolph’s eyes were closed and his face twitched slightly. He breathed heavily for a few minutes before going still, the color drained from his face. A warden shook Randolph and yelled his name, but there was no reaction and no movement. A medic was called in at 6:11 p.m. and Randolph was subsequently pronounced dead.

Jordan Kirkland, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections, said at a news briefing afterward that the family of the victim had asked him to thank Gov. Ron DeSantis on their behalf. Kirkland said earlier that three members of the victim’s family had planned to be witnesses but he didn’t elaborate.

DeSantis, the Republican who signed the death warrant, has ordered more executions in a single year than any Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976. The previous state record was eight executions in 2014. DeSantis said recently that his goal is to bring justice to victims’ families who have waited decades for the death sentences to be carried out.

According to court records, Randolph attempted in August 1988 to break into the safe at a convenience store in Palatka, where he had previously worked. Randolph was spotted by the manager, McCollum, and the two began to struggle.

Randolph then beat, strangled, stabbed and raped McCollum before leaving the store and taking the woman’s car, the records show.

Three women witnessed Randolph leaving the store and called the sheriff’s office after seeing through the window that the store was in disarray. A deputy responded and found McCollum still alive. Taken to a hospital in a coma, she died six days later of severe brain injuries, according to doctors.

Randolph was arrested shortly afterward at a Jacksonville grocery store while trying to borrow money and also cash in lottery tickets stolen from the convenience store, according to deputies. Investigators said Randolph admitted to the attack and directed them to bloody clothing he had discarded.

The Florida Supreme Court denied Randolph’s appeals last week. He had argued that a lower court had abused its discretion in denying him access to public records and that his own lawyers had acted without his consent. The U.S. Supreme Court denied Randolph’s final appeal Thursday morning.

Including Randolph, a total of 44 men have died by court-ordered execution this year in the U.S., and more than a dozen other people are scheduled to be put to death during the rest of 2025 and next year.

Florida has executed more people than any other state this year, trailed by Alabama, South Carolina and Texas with five each. Two more executions are planned next month in Florida under death warrants signed by DeSantis.

Mark Allen Geralds, 58, is scheduled for Florida’s 18th execution on Dec. 9. He was convicted of fatally stabbing a woman during home invasion robbery.

Frank Athen Walls, 58, is set for Florida’s 19th execution on Dec. 18. He was convicted of fatally shooting a man and woman during home invasion robbery, and he later confessed to three other killings.

Florida’s lethal injections are carried out with a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state Department of Corrections.

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DOJ throttles dissent with law prohibiting "impeding" federal officials

 The videos have become commonplace. Federal officers wearing masks and bulletproof vests subdue a moped driver in the middle of a busy D.C. street. A 70-year-old protester in Chicago is pushed to the ground by an armed Border Patrol agent holding a riot gun. In Los Angeles, an agent shoves away a demonstrator, reported The Atlantic.

These videos capture the aggressive tactics of immigration officers under the second Trump administration. But they share something else, too. In each instance, following documented violence by federal officers toward protesters and immigrants, the Justice Department pressed charges—against the victim of that violence. Those three people, according to the DOJ, had all broken a law prohibiting “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officials.

As the government continues to attempt mass deportations, that law, Section 111 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, has become a favored tool of the Justice Department for painting opposition to immigration enforcement as a corrosive, lawless force. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security often describe these cases in exaggerated language, even referring to defendants as “domestic terrorists,” though the law has nothing to do with terrorism. Across the country, prosecutors have charged case after case in federal court—one against a member of Congress; one against a congressional candidate; another against a bystander who happened to walk by a protest at the wrong time; and, most memorably, another against a Washington, D.C. man who hurled a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer, creating an instant symbol of protest for a city patrolled by the National Guard and other federal forces. 

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CREATORS: Trump Administration's Crackdown on Expression Reminiscent of McCarthy Era

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
November 18, 2025

McCarthyism hearkens back to a dark time in American history. The term has entered political nomenclature to describe government activity that suppresses unfavorable political or social views. The American Heritage Dictionary defines McCarthyism as "The use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, to suppress opposition."

Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was a little-known junior senator from Wisconsin until February 1950, when he claimed, in a speech given in Wheeling, W.Va., that he possessed a list of 205 card-carrying Communists employed by the U.S. Department of State.

The speech launched Sen. McCarthy into the national spotlight. Although the blacklisting of Hollywood luminaries is often thought of as a McCarthy-era witch hunt, the sinister work of the House Un-American Activities Committee predated him.

However, McCarthy's subsequent anti-communist crusade heavily contributed to the climate of fear and blacklisting that followed, and impacted many people in Hollywood, academia, business and the military.

As chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee, Sen. McCarthy conducted hearings on communist subversion in America and investigated alleged communist infiltration of the Armed Forces.

Some have pointed to — with growing concern — similarities between McCarthy and the Trump administration. Ruth Conniff of the Wisconsin Examiner interviewed David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of "A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father," a book about his father's journey after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

Maraniss told Conniff, "There are several obvious haunting similarities," between McCarthy and President Donald Trump, "the demonization of others, the calling of all opponents Marxist or communists or enemies of the state, the gross manipulation of truth, the use of fear to stifle dissent and pressure to silence the media or get the press to go along."

Maraniss ominously pointed out, "McCarthy was only a senator, and now we're dealing with the president, with full control of the levers of power which McCarthy did not have, ranging from the Justice Department to the military."

During the first year of Trump's second term, the federal government has aggressively cracked down on political expression reminiscent of some of the most troubling periods in America's history.

The administration has asked for — and been provided with — the prosecution of the president's political opponents. They have fired government employees for taking positions perceived as disloyal to Trump. They have even gone after unfriendly law firms, withdrawing security clearances and government contracts.

The Department of "Defense" is now the Department of "War." Nearly all national news organizations are banned from the Pentagon. The president pushed for blocking AP reporters from the White House press pool because the wire service refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America."

Trump pushed to withhold funding for colleges and universities, coaxing large payments to reinstate funding. He has investigated media companies, filing lawsuits and demanding huge settlements by implying industry mergers may be in jeopardy.

Is there a tipping point when it comes to the authoritarian machination of the Trump administration? For all the unease, discomfort and fear caused by McCarthy, his reign of fear lasted all of four years.

For Sen. McCarthy, public sentiment turned against him following his reckless attacks on the U.S. Army in the summer of 1954. The Army had retained a noted attorney, Joseph Welch, who challenged McCarthy on live television.

In an exchange that became historic, McCarthy brought up the fact that a young lawyer in Welch's office had once belonged to an organization suspected of being a communist front group. Welch was angered by McCarthy's blatant attack on his young associate. He responded with vigor and emotion, pointedly asking McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Within six months, McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate. In less than three years, he died a disgraced and broken man.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Mangino discusses murder of cheerleader on Law & Crime Network

Watch my interview with Elizabeth Millner of Law & Crime Network regarding the murder of an Alabama high school cheerleader at a bonfire with friends.

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Judge: 'Government misconduct' may result in dismissing charges against James Comey

A federal magistrate judge said that the criminal case against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, could be in trouble, according to The New York Times. The case is in jeopardy because of a series of apparent errors committed in front of the grand jury by Lindsey Halligan, the inexperienced prosecutor picked by President Trump to oversee the matter.

The remarkable rebuke of Ms. Halligan came in a 24-page ruling in which the magistrate judge, William E. Fitzpatrick, ordered her to give Mr. Comey’s lawyers all of the grand jury materials she used to obtain the indictment and raised the question of whether “government misconduct” in the case might require dismissing the charges altogether.

In his ruling, Judge Fitzpatrick said that when Ms. Halligan appeared — by herself — in front of the grand jury in September to seek an indictment accusing Mr. Comey of lying to and obstructing Congress in 2020 testimony, she made at least two “fundamental and highly prejudicial” misstatements of the law. He also pointed out that the grand jury materials he ordered her to turn over to him for his review this month appeared to be incomplete and “likely do not reflect the full proceedings.”

“The court is finding that the government’s actions in this case — whether purposeful, reckless or negligent — raise genuine issues of misconduct, are inextricably linked to the government’s grand jury presentation and deserve to be fully explored by the defense,” Judge Fitzpatrick wrote.

As part of his ruling, the judge ordered prosecutors to provide Mr. Comey’s lawyers by Monday evening with the same grand jury materials that he himself has already looked at — a measure he described as “an extraordinary remedy.” Typically, grand jury notes are kept secret before trial, even from defendants and their lawyers.

But the disclosure was needed, Judge Fitzpatrick said, to permit Mr. Comey’s legal team to delve into the question of whether Ms. Halligan and an F.B.I. agent who testified in front of the grand jury had conducted themselves properly when they secured the indictment.

Minutes before the first portion of the grand jury notes were to be handed over to Mr. Comey’s legal team, prosecutors filed an emergency request seeking to halt Judge Fitzpatrick’s order. Calling it “contrary to law,” the prosecutors said they wanted to quickly raise objections to the ruling in front of Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff, the district court judge who is overseeing the case.

The ruling by Judge Fitzpatrick was only the most recent setback in the Justice Department’s efforts to bring charges against Mr. Comey — a decision that was initially rejected by Ms. Halligan’s predecessor as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik S. Siebert. In an extraordinary move, Mr. Trump ousted Mr. Siebert in September to make way for Ms. Halligan after he suggested there was insufficient evidence to file an indictment against Mr. Comey.

Judge Fitzpatrick’s harsh words came just days after a different judge involved in the Comey case raised doubts about a separate question pertaining to Ms. Halligan: namely, whether Attorney General Pam Bondi had lawfully appointed her to her post as U.S. attorney in the first place. The judge overseeing that issue said she would make a decision on the matter by Thanksgiving.

The indictment against Mr. Comey charges him with lying to and obstructing Congress during an appearance he made in September 2020 in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the hearing, he was asked questions about whether he had authorized anyone at the F.B.I. to serve as an anonymous source in newspaper articles about sensitive investigations.

Ms. Halligan, who had never worked on a criminal case until she was thrust into the Comey prosecution, has faced extensive scrutiny from the moment Mr. Trump installed her atop the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia against the wishes of many career prosecutors there. Her critics have pointed out that her previous experience in the law was limited to working as an insurance lawyer and serving as a personal lawyer to Mr. Trump.

It is extremely unusual for judges to examine how prosecutors act in front of grand juries, let alone to openly criticize their conduct. But that is exactly what Judge Fitzpatrick did to Ms. Halligan.

He noted that during her grand jury presentation she appears to have misrepresented a basic tenet of the law by suggesting that Mr. Comey did not have the right, under the Fifth Amendment, to avoid testifying at his own trial.

She also appears to have made another astonishing error, Judge Fitzpatrick said. In his ruling, he pointed out that she told grand jurors that they did not have to rely solely “on the record before them” to return an indictment against Mr. Comey, but instead “could be assured the government had more evidence — perhaps better evidence — that would be presented at trial.”

The judge also said that Ms. Halligan appears to have botched her efforts to pare down the three-count indictment she had initially sought against Mr. Comey after grand jurors rejected one of the charges. Moreover, he noted that the grand jury transcripts he later received from her did not appear to contain her presentation of the second, two-charge indictment to the grand jury, leaving the record incomplete.

If, however, a second presentation was never made, then the court “is in uncharted legal territory,” he went on.

That would suggest, he wrote, “that the indictment returned in open court was not the same charging document presented to and deliberated upon by the grand jury.”

“Either way,” the judge concluded, “this unusual series of events, still not fully explained by the prosecutor’s declaration, calls into question the presumption of regularity generally associated with grand jury proceedings, and provides another genuine issue the defense may raise to challenge the manner in which the government obtained the indictment.”

Judge Fitzpatrick mentioned one more potential problem with the government’s grand jury presentation. He questioned whether the F.B.I. agent who was the sole witness to have testified may have inadvertently disclosed information that should not have been revealed because of the attorney-client privilege.

Ultimately, the decision about whether to dismiss the case based on these purported grand jury errors will lie with Judge Nachmanoff, the district court judge. Judge Nachmanoff has already scheduled a hearing for early December to consider separate but related claims by Mr. Comey’s lawyers that Ms. Halligan had abused the grand jury process.

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Alito and colleagues challenge compassionate release

 Madiba K. Dennie writing for Balls & Strikes:

 Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in three cases about the conditions under which federal judges can reduce a prison sentence. As a general rule, judges may not modify a term of imprisonment once it’s been imposed. But four decades ago, Congress enacted a statutory exception for compassionate release, empowering judges to shorten a prison term if “extraordinary and compelling reasons” warrant relief.

Congress did not, however, give much guidance as to what a compelling reason actually is, beyond specifying that rehabilitation alone is insufficient, and that any sentence reduction must be “consistent with applicable policy statements issued by the Sentencing Commission.” Identifying qualifying circumstances is thus up to individual judges evaluating requests for release—and, of course, a matter of some debate

In the first case the Court heard, Fernandez v. United States, a district court judge reduced a sentence because he doubted the reliability of the evidence, and had concerns about a significant sentencing disparity between Fernandez and one of his co-defendants. A federal appeals court then held that the district court judge had abused his discretion because he should not have considered Fernandez’s potential innocence—something neither Congress nor the Sentencing Commission ever said.

In the other two cases, Rutherford v. United States and Carter v. United States, judges said they could not consider the fact that the defendants asking for a sentence reduction would have received significantly shorter prison terms had they been convicted after Congress enacted the First Step Act of 2018, a bipartisan criminal justice reform law. But this, too, is not so simple: The Sentencing Commission has explicitly said judges can consider factors like this under certain circumstances.

The uninspiring success rate of the defendants in these three cases—zero for three—doesn’t support an inference that judges are especially inclined to find “extraordinary and compelling reasons” to reduce a prison sentence. Yet Justice Samuel Alito spent Wednesday morning defending the sanctity of mandatory minimum sentences, deeply disturbed by the notion that judges could be letting people out of prison for little reason other than their personal belief that prison is bad. 

“There are a lot of district judges and other federal judges who don’t like mandatory minimums,” Alito said to Fernandez’s counsel. “Could a district judge say, ‘You know what, that mandatory minimum is too much under the circumstances of this case, so I’m going to grant a sentence reduction?’” he asked. 

Alito pressed Rutherford’s counsel, David Frederick, on this same issue. “Is it a permissible factor for a judge to include in the determination a disapproval of the mandatory minimum?” Alito asked. Frederick politely responded with the answer the statute already provides: that a judge would be abusing their discretion if they just didn’t like mandatory minimums, but would be within their discretion if they thought departing from a mandatory minimum was justified by the circumstances of the particular case. Alito was unsatisfied. “I don’t quite see the difference between those two things,” he said.

To illustrate the difference, Frederick offered a hypothetical, imagining a 75-year-old with a life-threatening disease in a prison without adequate medical facilities. “It is not an abuse of discretion for the court to say that, in this particular circumstance, that mandatory minimum is too harsh,” said Frederick. At this, Chief Justice John Roberts interrupted. “Well, you really shouldn’t call it a mandatory minimum then,” said Roberts. “You probably should call it something like the presumptive minimum depending upon subsequent developments.”

Alito later moved to Carter’s counsel, David O’Neill, who also affirmed that district courts could not reduce sentences solely because they disagree with mandatory minimums as a matter of principle. When Alito asked if any provision of the statute “specifically” states that, Carter, too, explained that any categorical approach would be at odds with a statute that’s “all about the individual circumstances.”

If Alito really wants to be angry about the criminal legal system, there are countless real problems he can choose from. His choice to fixate on hypothetical judges with vendettas against mandatory minimums instead is an illustrative example of the conservative conception of criminal law. In Alito’s view, the criminal legal system already does what it is supposed to do: inflict maximum punishment. Any attempts to reform that system are inherently illegitimate.

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