SCOTUS will hear challenge to limits of executive power today

Today the Supreme Court will consider whether President Trump can fire independent government officials despite laws meant to protect them from politics, a major test for the justices to determine how far to expand presidential power, reports The New York Times.

The justices are being asked to overturn a landmark decision from 1935, which said that Congress could put limits on the president’s authority to remove some executive branch officials.

In recent rulings, the court’s conservative majority signaled that it was receptive to Mr. Trump’s claims that a president should not be forced to delegate authority to agency heads at odds with his agenda.

A decision in the president’s favor would call into question the constitutionality of job protections extended to more than two dozen other agencies Congress has charged with protecting consumers, workers and the environment — and potentially upend the fundamental structure of the modern government.

Since returning to the White House, Mr. Trump has fired government watchdogs, leaders of independent agencies and rank-and-file federal workers, drawing multiple legal challenges.

The Supreme Court has generally allowed the firings to take effect through temporary emergency orders. Monday’s case, involving the Federal Trade Commission, presents the first opportunity for the court to issue a conclusive ruling on the underlying legal questions of Mr. Trump’s firings.

Next month, the justices will separately consider whether the president has the power to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board governor. The justices have allowed Ms. Cook to remain in her post for now, signaling that the central bank may be uniquely insulated from presidential interference because of its history.

At issue on Monday is Mr. Trump’s firing in March of Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic member of the F.T.C. The president said he was removing her because she did not align with his agenda, despite a law that says the president can remove commissioners only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Ms. Slaughter promptly sued.

Congress intentionally created such bipartisan commissions — made up of experts who could not be fired by the president without cause — to ensure that policy decisions would be made free from politics.

The F.T.C., created in 1914, protects consumers from deceptive practices and monopoly power. It is led by five commissioners who serve staggered seven-year terms; no more than three can be members of the same party.

The F.T.C. has been led by only Republicans since March, after Mr. Trump fired a second Democrat, Alvaro Bedoya. After initially challenging his firing, Mr. Bedoya resigned, citing financial pressures.

A district court judge said in July that Ms. Slaughter’s firing was illegal, and in early September, a divided court panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reinstated her.

That court said that a commissioner could not be fired without the required grounds of “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” The panel pointed to the job protections upheld by the 1935 decision that also involved a fired F.T.C. commissioner.

In that decision, Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the court unanimously upheld removal restrictions for government officials on multimember boards. The justices in that case said President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not remove a member of the F.T.C. merely because of political differences.

But in the last 15 years, the court has repeatedly narrowed that decision to give the president more control over executive officials.

“Since 1789, the Constitution has been understood to empower the president to keep these officers accountable — by removing them from office, if necessary,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in 2010.

More recently, the court found that the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional because it did not allow the president to fire its single director without cause. The court allowed the job protections to remain for multimember bodies like the F.T.C.

But in its emergency orders issued this year, the conservative majority has let the president temporarily remove leaders of agencies led by such multimember boards, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

As a result, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, suggested in court filings that the precedent at issue was already a “dead letter” that should be overruled. Such tenure protections, he told the court in filings, unconstitutionally infringe on the president’s power to run the executive branch.

In response, Ms. Slaughter’s lawyers have told the court that getting rid of the precedent decades later would “profoundly destabilize institutions that are now inextricably intertwined with the fabric of American governance.”

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Members of Congress want video of boat attack released

Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the two survivors of the Sept. 2 strike on an alleged drug boat “were barely alive, much less engaging in hostilities,” when a follow-up strike took place, reported The New York Times.

 Top military officers briefed Himes and other top lawmakers last week on the Sept. 2 attacks. “When you actually watch the video, you realize they don’t have a radio. They’re barely hanging on and not slipping beneath the waves,” Himes said on Sunday. He called for the public release of the video saying that it was “important that people see what it looks like when the full force of the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under.”

Himes said he was confident in U.S. intelligence that said the boat was involved in drug trafficking, but said he did not believe the Trump administration knew the identify of all 11 people killed in the Sept. 2 boat strikes, which began a campaign of at least 21 similar attacks in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

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Brooklyn woman with mental health problems remains in jail uncharged for not revealing whereabouts of missing child

The Family Court in this case is doing precisely what the constitutional guarantee against compelled self-incrimination forbids: It is exerting the court’s coercive power to force Ms. Pritchett to give testimony that could expose her to criminal prosecution

On Thursday, the Brooklyn Family Court judge asked the woman the question for the seventh time:

Where was Jacob?

Jacob Pritchett, an 11-year-old so small that his neighbors in Brooklyn thought he was no older than 7, had not been seen for months. The police and a child welfare case worker, prompted by a call to 911, had gone to his Brownsville apartment on Oct. 1 to find him. But the woman who answered the door, Jacqueline Pritchett, told them she had never had a child, reported The New York Times.

The apartment was spotless and had the pungent scent of cleaning products, and the police could see toys in the bathroom and in the closet, according to court transcripts. But Ms. Pritchett, 50, continued repeating her claim even after Judge Dawn Marie Orsatti issued a civil warrant on Oct. 10, charging her with contempt for not revealing where her boy was, and sent her to Rikers Island.

Ms. Pritchett has been brought back to court repeatedly, and on Thursday, Judge Orsatti tried again.

“If you tell the court the whereabouts of Jacob, I will release you from incarceration,” Judge Orsatti said.

Ms. Pritchett, dressed in brown sweatpants and sweatshirt, sat next to her lawyer and looked back silently. Her lawyer, Daniela Mancini, leaned over and said her client was invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Judge Orsatti sent Ms. Pritchett back to Rikers.

The case has flummoxed detectives who scoured three months of surveillance footage taken from the building, looking for any sign of the boy. They traveled 330 miles to upstate New York to search a landfill where the garbage from the Brooklyn building was taken. They have interviewed neighbors and relatives, but no one has been able to help them figure out where Jacob, whom the police and neighbors have described as nonverbal, could be.

The answer appears to lie with Ms. Pritchett, but she has resisted giving one despite the efforts of the court, the police and the city’s Administration for Children’s Services.

Brooklyn Defender Services, the public defenders representing Ms. Pritchett, declined to comment about the boy’s disappearance or whether his mother knew anything about it. It has filed court papers arguing that she should be released immediately from Rikers Island, calling her detention a “constitutional violation.”

”The Family Court in this case is doing precisely what the constitutional guarantee against compelled self-incrimination forbids: It is exerting the court’s coercive power to force Ms. Pritchett to give testimony that could expose her to criminal prosecution,” wrote Brian A. Holbrook, a lawyer for Brooklyn Defenders, in a Dec. 2 petition.

It is unclear whether Jacob went to school. Before this fall, Ms. Pritchett did not appear to have a history of involvement with child welfare agencies in New York State, according to someone who viewed some of her social service records and spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

The police once made a check on Jacob in 2017 after a 911 call, according to court transcripts. The Police Department said it is continuing to investigate the case.

The 911 call that sent the police and A.C.S. to the Brownsville address this fall came from a worried neighbor, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case who was not authorized to discuss it.

Police officers went to the apartment in a three-story red brick building on Howard Avenue on Oct. 1 for a wellness check.

Ms. Pritchett told officers that she lived alone and “became loud and boisterous during the interview,” according to an internal police document.

During a hearing on Oct. 10, an A.C.S. caseworker, Gabriel Martindale, said that when he and the police arrived, he went inside and saw two mattresses. The apartment was dark and the electricity had been shut off.

The smell of cleaning products, he said, was “very strong.”

When Mr. Martindale asked whether the toys belonged to Jacob, Ms. Pritchett said they were hers. He then presented her with Jacob’s birth certificate and asked whether that was her son.

“She said she’s never had a child, that she has never had a period, that she’s never been with a man,” Mr. Martindale said. She then said “that she is Jesus Christ.”

Ms. Pritchett was taken to Brookdale University Hospital nearby for psychiatric evaluation. Neighbors said they had seen the police checking the building’s dumpsters. A police dog that later searched the apartment “got a hit” from the refrigerator inside the kitchen, the internal document stated.

On Oct. 9, the police were in Perinton, N.Y., near Rochester. Wearing white coveralls, they fanned out across the High Acres Landfill. The official said investigators went there after they learned the garbage collected at the Brooklyn apartment was sent there.

Neighbors said in interviews in October that they had not seen the boy in months, but had noticed that Ms. Pritchett, who had grown thinner, had lesions on her skin and sometimes talked to herself.

Shamik Burchet, who lives in the building and often saw Ms. Pritchett and Jacob, said the child “seemed really neglected.”

When the boy was younger, Mr. Burchet said, his mother sometimes left him sitting in a stroller alone in the building’s lobby.

“Sometimes I’d have to sit with him,” he said. “Eventually she’d come back around.”

Evelyn Rolon, who lives nearby and works as a bartender, said the mother and son moved into the building about seven years ago.

“I would hate to think that a mom would hurt her own child,” said Ms. Rolon, 49, who often saw Ms. Pritchett and her son. “I’m hoping she gave him to somebody because she got overwhelmed.”

Sometimes, Ms. Pritchett would meet neighbors at block parties. The boy was usually not with her, but at a cookout in early September, Ms. Rolon said she gave the woman two burgers — one for her and one for Jacob.

“He would be making sounds. He wasn’t formulating words,” Ms. Rolon said.

Ms. Pritchett was often seen out alone. Other times, they could hear her screaming at Jacob in the apartment.

“We’d tell her, ‘Stop yelling at the baby like that.’ You know how someone yells at a grown person? That’s how she used to yell at the baby,” Ms. Rolon said. “You could tell she was overwhelmed.”

In October, when officers from the crime scene unit were searching the apartment, they sealed the door with a neon green warning sign that forbade anyone from coming inside without police authorization. Affixed just below that sign were several pink and yellow stickers with happy faces.

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NBC News: Grand jury declines to indict N.Y. Attorney General Letitia James, less than two weeks after the first case was dismissed

The Justice Department failed to secure an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The presentation to the grand jury came less than two weeks after the original criminal case against her was dismissed.

James, a frequent political target of President Donald Trump’s who had successfully brought a fraud lawsuit against him, had previously been indicted by a grand jury on one charge of bank fraud and another of making false statements to a financial institution.

James has denied any wrongdoing. In a statement Thursday in response to reports that a grand jury did not re-indict her she said, "As I have said from the start, the charges against me are baseless. It is time for this unchecked weaponization of our justice system to stop."

"I am grateful to the members of the grand jury and humbled by the support I have received from across the country. Now, I will continue to do my job standing up for the rule of law and the people of New York," James said.

Lindsey Halligan, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and a former personal attorney to Trump with no prior prosecutorial experience, presented the case to a grand jury on her own in the first go-round — and that case was declared void on Nov. 24 when a judge found Halligan’s appointment was unlawful.

The Justice Department initially vowed to appeal the ruling by U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie, but ultimately decided to seek a new, untainted indictment against James, a source familiar with the deliberations told NBC News earlier this week.

The new case was presented to a grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia, by different prosecutors.

The failure to secure an indictment on Thursday does not bar prosecutors from attempting to do so again in the future.

A separate source familiar with the matter said there “should be no premature celebrations.”

The Justice Department does not comment on grand jury matters.

Prosecutors have also been discussing trying to again bring a case against former FBI Director James Comey, who was indicted in October on charges of making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation.

Currie dismissed the case against him on the same day she tossed the case against James on the same grounds.

Trump named Halligan U.S. attorney for the Eastern District on Sept. 20, the day after he forced out his initial pick, Erik Siebert, who resisted pressure to prosecute Comey and James.

The Halligan appointment also came after Trump urged Attorney General Pam Bondi in a social media post to push ahead with prosecutions of Comey, James and another perceived political adversary, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California.

“Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,’” Trump said the post, which a source previously confirmed to NBC News the president had intended as a direct message to Bondi, not a public post.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump continued, while praising Halligan as “a really good lawyer.”

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Vice Admiral Bradley to testify about Hegseth's order to 'kill everyone'

Navy Vice Adm. Frank "Mitch" Bradley will testify today before the chairs of the armed services committees and top Democrats, regarding the second strike on survivors following an attack on a "drug" boat in early September.  Below is a primer on disobeying unlawful orders prepared by Just Security:

 It has long been the case under customary international law that “superior orders” is no defense for war crimes. The Charter of the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo excluded the defense (arts. 8 and 6, respectively), as did the 1950 Nuremberg Principles (prin. IV). The absence of a superior orders defense has also been confirmed in the statutes of modern war crimes tribunals, including those of the International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (arts. 33, 7, and 6, respectively). Indeed, the defense is unavailable to international law violations generally. For instance, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the Inter-American Convention on the Forced Disappearance of Persons prohibit superior orders as a defense in national legislation implementing their prohibitions (arts. 2 and VIII, respectively). 

As with the affirmative duty to disobey an unlawful order, the ICRC has accurately stated that under customary international law, “[o]beying a superior order does not relieve a subordinate of criminal responsibility if the subordinate knew that the act ordered was unlawful or should have known because of the manifestly unlawful nature of the act ordered.” (ICRC Customary International Humanitarian Law study, Rule 155). 

U.S. military law likewise rejects the defense of superior order in the Manual for Courts-Martial. Rule 916(d) provides, “It is a defense to any offense that the accused was acting pursuant to orders unless the accused knew the orders to be unlawful or a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the orders to be unlawful.” The touchstone case reflecting the principle is U.S. v. Calley, which dealt with the murder of 22 children, women, and old men in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai. Lt. Calley claimed he was obeying an order because “he had been taught the doctrine of obedience throughout his military career” and that he “was acting in ignorance of the laws of war.” The U.S. Court of Military Appeals held that, 

the obedience of a soldier is not the obedience of an automaton. A soldier is a reasoning agent, obliged to respond, not as a machine, but as a person. The law takes these factors into account in assessing criminal responsibility for acts done in compliance with illegal orders.

The acts of a subordinate done in compliance with an unlawful order given him by his superior are excused and impose no criminal liability upon him unless the superior’s order is one which a man of ordinary sense and understanding would, under the circumstances, know to be unlawful, or if the order in question is actually known to the accused to be unlawful.

Thus, it is unlawful to obey an unlawful order, and merely following clearly illegal orders provides no defense. This being so, the questions in the Sept. 2 strikes are whether Secretary Hegseth’s reported order to Adm. Bradley was clearly unlawful and whether Bradley’s apparent follow-on order to conduct the second strike was likewise manifestly unlawful.

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CREATORS: The U.S. Senate's Great Money Grab

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
December 2, 2025

In early October, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed that the FBI obtained personal cell phone data from eight Republican senators as part of an investigation into the conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential Election so that outgoing President Donald Trump could remain in office.

In 2023, the FBI sought and obtained data about the senators' phone use from Jan. 4 through Jan. 7, 2021. The data showed when and to whom calls were made, as well as the duration and general location of the call. The data did not include the content of the call.

Some members of the Senate were outraged by the revelation. The U.S. Senate was so incensed at the perceived invasion of privacy that it decided that American taxpayers should pay the "aggrieved" senators millions of dollars to prevent the FBI from ever investigating senators without letting them know in advance.

While literally millions of federal workers were not being paid during the 43-day government shutdown, lawmakers were scheming about how to cash in on the government impasse.

As Americans were standing in line at food pantries, Senators were sitting in the proverbial "smoke-filled room" drawing up a real money grab — even by the lowly standards of the U.S. Congress.

Senate Republicans secured a provision in the bipartisan, shutdown-ending government funding package that could award senators millions of dollars for having their phone records collected without their knowledge as part of the election investigation.

A person with direct knowledge of the legislative negotiations confirmed to Politico that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) oversaw the inclusion of the money grab provision. It was tucked into the legislative branch spending measure for fiscal year 2026, part of a three-bill appropriations package approved by the Senate.

According to the blog Lawfare, the law created a civil cause of action — "that is, the ability to sue in court — if a senator is not notified when providers (cell phone companies) receive a subpoena for his or her data, or that of his or her staff."

The law makes it possible for eight sitting senators to cash in. The legislation conveniently provides that this new cause of action is retroactive to January 2022 — the data was obtained in 2023.

This means that those eight senators will recover a minimum of $500,000. Eight senators voted to create a retroactive cause of action so they could recover at least half a million dollars.

Lawfare suggests, the $500,000 remedy is available for each "instance," which means that a typical subpoena seeking data from a senator's cell phone and email account could cost $1 million. Collecting the same data from a Senator's staff — say, five individuals plus the senator — could cost taxpayers $6 million in damages. Lawfare further points out that the common practice of "refreshing the collected data by issuing new subpoenas as the investigation progresses could double or triple the amount of damages."

The controversy got more interesting when members of the House of Representatives finally read the legislation they passed to end the government shutdown. It was unclear if the House was outraged more by what the Senate did or by finding out the payoff did not include members of the House.

The House recently voted 427-0 to repeal the self-serving part of the new law. According to PBS, a senior White House official, who was granted anonymity to describe President Trump's thinking, said that the president had no objections to the language added by the senators and indicated privately that he does not think it was a bad provision. The source said, "The White House had been fully looped in as senators drafted the bill."

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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DOJ considers new indictments against Comey and James

The U.S. Justice Department is weighing seeking new indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, after a federal judge dismissed both cases last week, according to two people familiar with the matter, reported Reuters. 

The department could seek new charges against Comey and James as soon as this week, though the timing was not yet clear, the people added, speaking anonymously in order to discuss non-public department deliberations.

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Representatives for James could not be immediately reached for comment. An attorney for Comey declined to comment.

A federal judge last week dismissed the criminal cases against both Comey and James - two of President Donald Trump's perceived political enemies - after she determined that both indictments were secured by an unlawfully appointed U.S. Attorney in Virginia's Eastern District.

In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie found that the Trump Justice Department violated the U.S. Constitution's Appointments Clause and federal law by appointing Lindsey Halligan in September as Interim U.S. Attorney.

Halligan's predecessor was forced out of his job after expressing concerns about the evidence in both cases. Halligan presented evidence alone to the grand juries in both criminal cases. Career prosecutors in her office refused to participate.

Currie's ruling left the door open for the Justice Department to try to seek fresh indictments.

Both Comey and James have been longtime targets of Trump's ire. Comey as FBI director oversaw an investigation into alleged ties between Trump's 2016 election campaign and the Russian government, and was fired by Trump in 2017.

James, an elected Democrat, successfully sued Trump and his family real estate company for fraud.

Comey pleaded not guilty to charges of making false statements and obstructing Congress after he was accused of lying and authorizing leaks to the news media.

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James pleaded not guilty to charges of bank fraud and lying to a financial institution. Halligan alleged that she filed misleading mortgage documents to secure more favorable loan terms.

Both Comey and James have alleged the prosecutions against them were vindictive, driven by Trump's animus towards them.

It was unclear whether prosecutors could seek to bring a new case against Comey over the same conduct. The five-year statute of limitations on the charges expired on September 30, and Comey's lawyers have already indicated in court filings that they do not believe prosecutors have more time to refile the charges.

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