DL Open Thread: Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Virginia Voters Approve Congressional Redistricting:
Democrats maintained their electoral momentum on Tuesday by securing the passage of an aggressively gerrymandered House map in Virginia, which could deliver the party up to four extra seats as it tries to win back control of Congress.
Democrats sought to focus the campaign on President Trump, who instigated the nationwide redistricting fight last summer in Texas to help House Republicans in the midterms. A vote for a gerrymandered House map, Democrats argued, was a vote to help their party stop Mr. Trump’s agenda. The president stayed out of the contest until the final hours before Election Day, when he urged Virginians to block the map.
“Donald Trump tried to rig the midterm elections by gerrymandering the national congressional map,” Mr. Jeffries said in an interview on Tuesday night. “He has failed.”
That’s the story in a nutcase, I mean, nutshell. Trump pushed for this mid-decade scheme to pad Rethug chances of retaining control of the House, For once, for once, Democrats fought back and pretty much held the fight to a draw. Might even be better than a draw if some of those newly-created Texas districts elect Democrats, which is quite possible now that Hispanic voters are abandoning Trump in droves.
BTW, the NYT maps that track up-to-the-minute results is my newest Favorite Thing In The World. Everything a political junkie like me could ask for.
On Saturday the New York Times reported the Department of Justice has hired Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old former U.S. attorney and political commentator, to head the “grand conspiracy” investigation targeting the president’s perceived enemies that is underway in the Southern District of Florida under the leadership of U.S. attorney — and Trump loyalist — Jason A. Reding Quiñones. DiGenova brings with him decades of experience; he’s been carrying out GOP vendetta since the days when the president was a tabloid joke and running around with Jeffrey Epstein in New York more than 30 years ago.
News of diGenova’s appointment comes on the heels of a prosecutor withdrawing from the case, apparently due to doubts she had about prosecuting former CIA director John O. Brennan. Maria Medetis Long reportedly expressed concern that the evidence in the matter didn’t merit moving forward with an indictment, and as a career prosecutor, she should know. But diGenova does not have such lengthy experience. Although he was once a federal prosecutor during the Reagan administration, he has since made a career as a conservative commentator and operative whose most recent political activity came as a member of the so-called “elite strike force team” assembled by Rudy Giuliani to contest the 2020 election. (DiGenova appeared alongside the former New York City mayor at the infamous press conference held at the Four Seasons Landscaping Company where Giuliani spoke with black rivulets dripping down his face like a Real Housewife on a crying jag.)
We used to patronize Luigi Vitrone’s Pastabilities. He named one of his dishes after diGenova. We never ate it. I highly recommend the Salon article. He and his wife have been legal assassins dating back to their obsession with the Clintons. The piece provides chapter-and-verse.
Trump Goes After The Southern Poverty Law Center. Because the DOJ is deliberately blind to justice:
The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups without disclosing the payments to donors, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
The center’s CEO Bryan Fair said the payments went to confidential informants in order to monitor threats of violence from the extremist groups — and that the information the center received was frequently shared with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. The information gathered by the informants helped save lives, Fair said Tuesday.
“We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC,” Fair said.
The Justice Department alleged that the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the same extremism that it claimed to be fighting. The indictment says payments of at least $3 million went to informants affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Party of America and other groups between 2014 and 2023.
Bizarro World stuff. The DOJ is suing the SPLC because they were allegedly supporting these hate groups? Puh-leeze. The SPLC holds a proud place in the battle against extremism:
Alabama lawyer Morris Dees founded the organization in 1971, starting a civil rights-focused law practice for people who were poor or disenfranchised. At the time, federal laws and U.S. Supreme Court rulings designed to end Jim Crow-era segregation were still fairly new, and widespread resistance to desegregation persisted in the South.
People who faced continued discrimination often struggled to find attorneys who were willing to represent them in court; lawyers were reluctant to bring the first lawsuits to test the civil rights laws.
Dees and another attorney, Joe Levin, took on some of those cases, representing their clients for free. Some of those earliest cases resulted in the desegregation of recreational facilities, the integration of the Alabama state trooper force and other reforms, according to the center’s website.
By the 1980s, the civil rights group was monitoring white supremacist organizations in the U.S. The effort, initially called “Klanwatch” and focused on the Ku Klux Klan, was later renamed the “Intelligence Project,” and expanded to include other extremist groups.
Many of the groups did not appreciate being called out, monitored and sometimes sued by the center. Members of the KKK tried to burn down the center’s Montgomery offices on July 28, 1983, in retaliation for lawsuits filed against Klan groups.
The indictment says the center told donors the money would be used to help dismantle violent extremist groups, but did not disclose that some of the funds would actually be used to pay members of those groups. Some legal experts say it’s an unusual legal approach.
“That’s a new way of going after a charity — I’m somewhat surprised,” said Phil Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Typically, when a nonprofit group is charged with fraud, it’s because someone is accused of pilfering donated funds to line their own pockets, Hackney said.
But in this case, the government is targeting the method and intent in which a nonprofit used its money, he said.
The law has never required nonprofit groups to hand donors a line-item receipt for every sensitive operation, said Todd Spodek, a federal criminal defense attorney with Spodek Law Group P.C. in Manhattan.
“From a defense perspective, this isn’t a fraud case. It is a political attack on standard investigative tradecraft,” said Spodek. “We are talking about high stakes intelligence work where discretion isn’t a form of deception, it is a matter of survival.”
In order to win a conviction, the government will have to prove the center engaged in a deliberate scheme to lie, Spodek said.
“They simply cannot. Silence of tactical details is not a crime, and you don’t get to call it fraud just because the government dislikes the methods used to get results,” he said. He later continued, “The prosecution is trying to turn operational discretion into a felony, which is a massive overreach.”
Later, in one of many phone interviews that day, Trump said: “They [Iran] want me to open it. The Iranians desperately want it opened. I’m not opening it until a deal is signed.” In another unfiltered interview, he said: “They have agreed to everything,” adding specifically: “They have agreed to never close the strait of Hormuz again.” A day later, Iran closed the strait, leaving the impression that Trump, not for the first time, underestimated Iran’s resolve.
One Iranian diplomatic outpost in Ghana pointed out on Tuesday: “In the past 24 hours the president of the United States has: — Thanked Iran for closure of Hormuz; threatened Iran; blamed China; praised China; declared the blockade a success; confirmed Iran restocked through the blockade; promised a deal with Iran; promised bombs will fall on Iran.” The embassy described Trump as a one-man WhatsApp chat group.
At the weekend, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said of Trump: “He talks too much.”
Howzabout a musical coda?:
What do you want to talk (too much) about?
