DL Open Thread: Saturday, October 18, 2025
Gee, Look Who Trump Pardoned During The Friday News Dump:
Former Representative George Santos of New York, the disgraced Republican fabulist whose lies made him an object of national scorn, was released from a federal prison on Friday night after President Trump commuted his seven-year sentence for fraud.
His lawyer, Joseph Murray, said that Mr. Santos was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton in New Jersey after 10 p.m. on Friday night. “A great injustice has been corrected,” Mr. Murray said.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump suggested that politics had been a major factor in his decision, commending Mr. Santos for sharing his views and contrasting him with Democrats. Calling the former congressman “somewhat of a ‘rogue,’” Mr. Trump said that he believed that Mr. Santos’s sentence was excessive given the nature of his financial crimes.
The president also suggested he had been moved by Mr. Santos’s accounts of being in prison, which he had published in a regular column in a local Long Island newspaper.
It would be far too obvious to point out why Trump loves fraudsters, so I won’t. Nice to know there’s one prisoner who can ‘move’ Trump. You know, while he ‘moves’ prisoners to Parts Unknown.
Turns Out The ‘Domestic Terrorists’ Are Who We Thought They Were. ICE agents, mostly. And the Attorney General of the United States:
Ever since the Trump Administration started to blitz Chicago with a surge of federal immigration enforcement, it’s touted the arrests of people who’ve gathered to protest the operations.
Sometimes it describes these people as “domestic terrorists,” other times “rioters.” Greg Bovino — the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commander with a checkered past who leads what the Trump administration calls Operation Midway Blitz — has called them “unhinged, vile mouthed individuals.” One senior ICE official told Glenn Beck that those arrested during protests against the operation were “professional agitators that are being brought in.” (BTW, I wouldn’t mind having a part-time job as a professional agitator, feel free to contact me.)
A close look at the cases that the administration has brought in court shows that the government’s charges, mostly of assaulting or resisting federal officers, are faltering as they come up against video evidence or lack thereof. In at least four cases that were brought in connection with protests against Midway Blitz, Chicago federal prosecutors either withdrew charges or had a judge declare that they failed to meet their burden of probable cause, per a TPM review.
These cases are important not only because prosecutors are withdrawing them in their initial stages. The administration has sought, largely successfully, to portray these operations in Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and elsewhere as focused on immigration enforcement. They involve large numbers of federal law enforcement officers ostensibly charged with related missions: CBP patrols the border; ICE is responsible for enforcing immigration law (as administrative as it may be). Showy missions like the Blackhawk helicopter raid on a South Side Chicago apartment building use pyrotechnics to reinforce that impression.
But the reality is that these overbearing operations also affect U.S. citizens. They involve federal law enforcement taking aggressive steps against people who record their actions or who stage protests. The increased threat of facing charges after appearing at a protest can have a chilling effect as well.
The charges also come after the White House issued NSPM-7 on September 25. NSPM-7 is a national security memorandum that directs federal law enforcement to consider “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity” as well as opposition to traditional values as factors that may lead a person to commit acts of political violence. Days later, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois and Oregon on Sept. 29 to be maximally aggressive in charging “every person suspected of threatening or assaulting a federal law enforcement officer or interfering with federal law enforcement operations.”
Judge Jeanine Comes A Cropper In DC:
In a closely watched case, a federal jury acquitted a woman Thursday on charges of assaulting a federal law enforcement officer over the summer during a transfer of detainees to ICE outside of the D.C. jail.
Federal grand juries had declined three times to indict Sydney Reid on felony charges for the incident. Rather than dropping the case, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro charged it as a misdemeanor and took it to trial. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said it may have been the first time any criminal defendant has been charged federally in D.C. with misdemeanor assault on a federal officer, WUSA’s Sophie Rosenthal reports.
Before the jury even got the case, Sooknanan acquitted Reid of the misdemeanor as to one of of the federal officers because of insufficient evidence she’d assaulted him. The officer in question had testified to the grand jury that Reid has initiated physical contact, but video of the incident showed that wasn’t true, Sooknanan said in court.
That left the jury to decide whether Reid had assaulted the other officer, the sole witness for the prosecution. That officer didn’t turn over some of her text messages about the case until the first day of trial, and even then one was missing. “The missing message was only discovered in the middle of cross-examination,” WUSA reported.
The prosecutor argued that the missing message was the result of a mistake the officer made while screenshotting the messages. But Judge Sooknanan was out of patience. “That seems to be a common theme with all your witnesses. Did they lie, or did they continuously make mistakes?” Sooknanan told the prosecutor.
Yet Another Trump Ideologue Will Hear Delaware Federal Cases. Approved, of course, on Party lines:
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals — the federal appellate court with a jurisdiction that includes Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey — is welcoming its latest member. Jennifer Mascott will hear cases that arise out of Delaware.
Confirmed in a narrow 50-47 U.S. Senate vote, Mascott becomes the latest Trump-aligned nominee to secure a lifetime seat on the federal appellate bench, further entrenching a conservative majority on one of the country’s most influential courts. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to vote against confirmation.
Her confirmation, delivered almost entirely along party lines, drew sharp criticism from Senate Democrats — particularly those from Delaware — who condemned the process as “norm-shattering” in ignoring long-standing judicial customs, saying she has “little — if any — connection to our state or to the 3rd Circuit.”
“Ms. Mascott has never been a member of the Delaware bar and was only admitted to practice before the Third Circuit two months ago,” Delaware’s Democratic U.S. Sens. Chris Coons and Lisa Blunt Rochester wrote in a shared statement. “Her key qualification appears to be that she works in President Trump’s White House Counsel’s Office. She has never been a judge of any kind, yet she is nominated to one of the highest judicial posts in the country.”
She does have one tie to Delaware, however:
Mascott admitted during her confirmation process that she is not a Delaware resident, was not registered to vote there and has not practiced law before a Delaware court. Her only connection to Delaware is a beach house she and her family own — a fact Delaware’s senators and other critics repeatedly seized upon.
Quick–somebody ask Dan Cruce what she’s really like.
What do you want to talk about?
