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| Sep 17, 2026 | The fight over congressional maps put nearly 35 million people into new House districts, report says | Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
By MATT BROWN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House has changed the congressional districts for one-tenth of Americans and significantly altered t... |
| Aug 25, 2026 | The Trump administration says it’s investigating these Colorado institutions. Here’s what’s really happening. | Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration has announced a flurry of investigations into Democratic-led states and their institutions.
Colorado has... |
| Jul 29, 2026 | Former FCC Officials Line Up To Blast Brendan Carr’s Lawless Censorship Of ABC | A bipartisan roster of former top-level FCC officials have submitted a filing to the Trump FCC blasting the agency’s ongoing violations of the First Amendment and urging it to terminate its phony “investigations” into ABC — including the un... |
| May 27, 2026 | Brendan Carr Says He Wants Public Input On His Censorship Campaign Against ABC | As we’ve previously noted, Brendan Carr recently launched a series of phony inquiries into ABC because Jimmy Kimmel made fun of the president’s wife. Carr can’t just come out and say that, so he’s launched a series of fake (and legally laug... |
| Apr 21, 2026 | As lawmakers ready bill allowing Coloradans to sue federal officials, prosecutors raise objections | Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
Wary of a potential court challenge, Colorado lawmakers are readying new legislation that would allow the state’s residents to sue federal officials — including immigration agents — when those offi... |
| Apr 17, 2026 | Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was called ‘Trump before Trump.’ Will the president follow him in defeat? (Editorial) | Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose illiberal right-wing policies have served as a template for President Donald Trump’s second term, was roundly defeated last Sunday. His electoral loss, ... |
| Nov 17, 2025 | Former FCC Officials Push To Kill Dated ‘News Distortion’ Rule Trump Abused To Bully CBS And ABC Into Feckless Compliance | A coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for the elimination of a longstanding FCC rule the Trump administration abused to “bully” ABC and CBS into kissing the president’s ass (I’ll use the term bully loosely since both companies see... |
| Nov 14, 2025 | Details Of DHS Agreement Reveal Risks Of Trump Administration’s Use Of Social Security Data For Voter Citizenship Checks | This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
This year, when states began using an expanded Department of Homeland Security system to check their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was suppose... |
| Oct 27, 2025 | Trump wants to cancel more funding during the shutdown. Courts have hampered his earlier efforts | By REBECCA BOONE and SUDHIN THANAWALA
Congress has the constitutional power of the purse, but President Donald Trump’s robust assertion of executive authority is testing even that basic tenet of U.S. democracy. Related Articles
Trump admini... |
| Sep 19, 2025 | No country for young politicians — and how to fix that (Opinion) | By Oscar Pocasangre
In democracies around the world, young people have started new political parties whenever the establishment has sidelined their views or excluded them from policymaking. These parties have sometimes reinvigorated politic... |
| Sep 14, 2025 | Why journalists are reluctant to call Trump an authoritarian – and why that matters for democracy (Opinion) | By Karrin Vasby Anderson
In an authoritarian state, the leader engages in unconstitutional or undemocratic practices for the purpose of consolidating power.
Key components of authoritarianism include rejecting democratic rules; denying the ... |
| May 12, 2025 | DOJ Lawyers Work For Justice & The Constitution — Not The White House | In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon tried to fire the Department of Justice prosecutor leading an investigation into the president’s involvement in wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.
Since then, the DOJ has gene... |
| May 6, 2025 | Trump’s Aggressive Actions Against Free Speech Speak A Lot Louder Than His Words Defending It | Harvard University took the extraordinary step of suing the Trump administration on April 21, 2025, claiming that the pressure campaign mounted on the school by the president and his Cabinet to force viewpoint diversity on campus violated t... |
| Jan 29, 2025 | National Politics | White House rescinds federal funding freeze amid legal battle, widespread confusion | Typically, the White House sends out money according to the priorities laid out in Congress, though there have been times when presidents have refused to spend all the cash they get. Thomas Jefferson, for example, declined to use money set ... |
| Jan 6, 2025 | National Politics | Trump is certified as the 2024 election winner without challenge, in stark contrast to 2021 violence | The whole process happened swiftly and without unrest. One by one, the state results were read aloud by the tellers as senators and representatives sat in seats in the House chamber. Vice President-elect JD Vance joined his former colleague... |
| Oct 28, 2024 | Editorials | Editorial: Election denialism could spark violence after a close race | What about election day? Experts believe that violence at polling places on Nov. 5 is unlikely, and steps have been taken since 2021 to protect polling places and sites where votes are counted.
But sadly the possibility of election day viol... |
| Jun 6, 2024 | Senate Rules Committee Advances Bills to Address Harmful AI in Elections | On May 15, 2024, the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules & Administration marked up and advanced three bills addressing the role of AI in elections: the Preparing Election Administrators for AI Act, the AI Transparency in Elections Act, and ... |
| Mar 5, 2024 | Appeals court denounces Florida's "Stop Woke Act" as "1st Amendment sin" | A federal appeals court in Florida blocked enforcement of employer provisions in a law state Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) dubbed the "Stop WOKE Act" in a unanimous ruling on Monday.
The big picture: In upholding an earlier ruling, the th... |
| Feb 13, 2024 | Donald Trump spent over $52 million in PAC donor money on legal fees last year. Here's where it all went. | Law Donald Trump spent over $52 million in PAC donor money on legal fees last year. Here's where it all went.
Jacob Shamsian, Narimes Parakul, Andy Kiersz, Haven Orecchio-Egresitz, and Laura Italiano
2024-02-13T10:06:01Z
Share icon An ... |
| Jul 31, 2023 | Scoop: Why Biden's team soured on Dems' election lawyer | President Biden's team recently split with the Democratic Party's longtime lawyer, Marc Elias, because of disagreements with Elias' legal strategies and strained personal relationships, according to several people familiar wi... |
| Feb 3, 2023 | A Chance for the Courts to Rein in Governing by Emergency | In a few weeks, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral argument in two seemingly unrelated cases concerning the use of pandemic-related emergency powers—one about canceling student loan debt and one about the influx of migrants at the ... |
| Jan 31, 2023 | The Lessons of the Electoral Count Reform Act: Next Steps in Reform | The Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA), which President Biden signed into law on Dec. 29, 2022, is nothing short of a miracle in the annals of democracy reform. It would merit that recognition at any time. But that it found a path through th... |
| Jun 7, 2022 | Why the Jan. 6 Committee Is Talking About Justice Department Independence | Again and again in recent years, current and former Justice Department officials—along with academics, journalists, and other commentators—have struggled to explain to the public the importance of Justice Department independence: the idea t... |
| May 17, 2022 | What Might a Congressional Counterpart to the Office of Legal Counsel Look Like? | In 1908, when Woodrow Wilson made the case for the vigorous exercise of presidential authority to lead the nation in “times of stress and change,” he sought to calm fears that doing so would upset the Constitution’s careful balancing of pow... |
| Apr 4, 2022 | Here’s What Electoral Count Act Reform Should Look Like | People across the political spectrum (including a majority of voters) agree that the United States’ process for electing presidents is flawed. The rules meant to ensure peaceful transitions of power are unnecessarily vulnerable to misunders... |
| Mar 28, 2022 | What Happened to Post-Trump Reform? | Listen to the authors talk about the article on The Lawfare Podcast.
“I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.”
So said Donald Trump in 2019, reflecting on his perception of the powers of his office. ... |
| Feb 18, 2022 | Trump’s Presidential Records Act Violations: Short- and Long-Term Solutions | On Jan. 31 and Feb. 5, The Washington Post reported that former President Trump routinely “tore up briefings and schedules, articles and letters, memos both sensitive and mundane” in violation of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and that ... |
| Jan 5, 2022 | Trump cancels January 6 press conference ahead of one year anniversary of the Capitol riot. | Donald Trump canceled a press conference at Mar-a-Lago just days before a court hearing over claims he incited the January 6 attack.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Donald Trump canceled a press conference set for the fi... |
| Dec 13, 2021 | Securing U.S. Democracy | With President Biden’s first democracy summit completed last week, the next steps will be continuing the dialogue the convening has generated and turning sights on implementing initiatives announced at and prompted by the conference. Given ... |
| Nov 5, 2021 | Enforcement Provisions in New National Security Reforms Packages | In the past several months, similar bipartisan reform packages have been introduced in the House and the Senate on war powers, national emergencies and arms sales. In July, Sens. Chris Murphy, Mike Lee and Bernie Sanders introduced the Nati... |
| Jul 19, 2021 | Justice Department Releases OLC Memo on Soleimani Strike | On July 16, the Justice Department released a redacted copy of a March 2020 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memorandum providing the legal rationale behind the controversial January 2, 2020, drone strike that killed Major General Qassem Solei... |
| Mar 9, 2021 | Here’s Merrick Garland’s Orientation Memo for the Trump-Era Hangover on Press Freedom | When President Biden announced the nomination of Merrick Garland as the next attorney general, Biden criticized incendiary rhetoric against the press as contributing to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. A new president—and new leaders... |
| Feb 5, 2021 | Can an Investigative Commission for the Trump Era Actually Work? A Proposal | How should Americans, and Congress and the Biden administration, think about the problem of accountability for the past four years?
On a routine basis, commentators and politicians throw around concepts that are more mood than they are oper... |
| Oct 22, 2020 | Forcing President Trump to Comply With the Law | For the past six months, President Trump has been breaking the law. We don’t mean that in some generic sense, but in a very specific one.
Under 50 U.S.C. § 1549, the president was supposed to provide both Congress and the public with a repo... |
| Oct 21, 2020 | Trump Administration Releases Overdue War Powers Report in Response to Lawsuit | On Oct. 20, 2020, the Trump administration publicly released the unclassified portion of a long-overdue report on the legal and policy frameworks for the use of military force. This report was originally due for release to both Congress and... |
| Aug 6, 2020 | The Senate Should Ask Chad Wolf About His Illegal Appointment | Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf will testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Aug. 6 regarding the deployment of federal officers to Portland, Oregon. While there are many critical qu... |
| Jul 24, 2020 | Can Congress Do Anything about Trump’s Abuse of the Pardon Power? | President Trump continues to misuse the constitutional power to pardon. Most recently, he commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, seemingly as a reward for Stone’s refusal to tell prosecutors, Congress or the public what he knows about Trump’... |
| Jun 13, 2020 | Using Qui Tam Statutes to Check Unconstitutional Exercises of Executive Power | On June 1, police, along with the National Guard, rammed protestors and hit them with shields and batons to clear a path through Lafayette Square so that President Trump could make his way to St. John’s Episcopal Church. Law enforcement als... |
| May 18, 2020 | Judge Sullivan Can Reject the Government’s Motion to Drop Flynn’s Case | In the wake of Attorney General William Barr’s unprecedented decision to drop the Department of Justice’s years-long prosecution of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, many observers are asking: Is this the end of the case... |
| May 6, 2020 | The Dormant Commerce Clause Can’t Override State and Local Lockdowns | As President Trump grows increasingly impatient to reopen the U.S. economy in the face of an approaching election, Attorney General William Barr has begun suggesting that those restrictions may violate the Constitution.
The claim is odd, be... |
| Apr 23, 2020 | L.M.-M. v. Cuccinelli: Trump’s Preference for Acting Officials Hits A Wall | For the better part of a year, the Trump administration tried without success to install the controversial former attorney general of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, in a high-ranking position at the Department of Homeland Security, even though t... |
| Apr 22, 2020 | Trump Can’t Play Politics With Aid to States | The national fight against the spread of the novel coronavirus demands a leader who can take charge of and defeat a grave threat, and who can put partisan politics aside to create a shared sense of national purpose. Instead, President Trump... |
| Mar 20, 2020 | The President’s Legal Shell Game to Avoid Accountability | It is a fundamental principle in our country that nobody is above the law, not even the president. This is not a new idea—it comes from the founding generation, which fought a war to escape from a king who legally “could do no wrong” and th... |
| Feb 28, 2020 | Why the Trump Administration May End Up in Court Over War Powers Reporting | This coming Sunday, March 1, is an important deadline for the Trump administration. That’s the day by which it must file a report detailing any changes to the “legal and policy frameworks for the United States’ use of military force and rel... |
| Feb 19, 2020 | The 2020 Presidential Candidates Stay (Mostly) Quiet on Law Enforcement Independence | These are hard times for the Justice Department. On Feb. 11, all four Justice Department attorneys prosecuting Trump associate Roger Stone withdrew from the case—and one resigned outright—after the department indicated that it would, follow... |
| Aug 24, 2019 | The Lawfare Podcast: Jessica Marsden on New Proposals for Protecting Democracy | In a recent white paper, the organization Protect Democracy makes the case that President Trump has used the powers of the presidency, federal resources, and intimidating rhetoric to manipulate election outcomes in the United States. The pa... |
| Aug 16, 2019 | Good News for Christopher Wray: Morale Is Up at (Most of) the FBI | Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect corrected climate survey responses we received from the FBI earlier today.
Here’s a dog-bites-man story: Amidst near constant presidential attacks on FBI officials, accusations of treaso... |
| May 21, 2019 | Why We’re Suing the FBI (Again) | It’s springtime here in Washington, D.C. And that leads the mind to just one place: the FBI’s annual internal climate survey.
Administered in February and March of each year, the climate survey presents FBI personnel with a battery of quest... |
| May 20, 2019 | Defending Mueller’s Constitutional Analysis on Obstruction and Faithful Execution | The extent to which federal obstruction of justice statutes apply to the president, especially when concerning actions facially within the office’s powers under Article II, has been hotly contested at least since President Trump fired FBI D... |
| May 7, 2019 | Today’s Headlines and Commentary | The U.S. State Department is opening three new counterterrorism training centers in Southeast Asia and Africa, the Wall Street Journal reported. Two such centers in the Middle East already train and equip local forces to respond to terroris... |
| Apr 6, 2019 | D.C. Circuit’s Lockdown on Grand Jury Material May Hinder Congress and Historians | McKeever v. Barr, a ruling issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on April 5, rejects the argument that federal judges can release grand jury evidence whenever they think it’s in the public interest. The holding may be bad... |
| Feb 16, 2019 | "Form and Legality": The Office of Legal Counsel’s Role in the National Emergency Declaration | President Trump announced in the Rose Garden on Feb. 15 that he is declaring a national emergency on the southern border, with the goal of obtaining an extra $6.5 billion to build a border wall. While reporting has described the role of the... |
| Jan 19, 2019 | The Lawfare Podcast: Ian Bassin on Protecting Democracy | Ian Bassin served in the White House Counsel's office under President Obama. At the dawn of the Trump administration, he became the impresario behind the litigating organization Protect Democracy, which has become an increasingly cross... |
| Jan 11, 2019 | What Independent Investigations of the Past Can Teach Congress About Its Role in the Mueller Probe | The new Congress is poised to investigate possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, whether Special Counsel Robert Mueller has finished his work or not. This task will be at once unprecedented and familiar. Never before in the hi... |
| Nov 1, 2018 | The Watergate Road Map: What It Says and What It Suggests for Mueller | In neat script near the top of the document, someone has written, “Filed under seal, March 1, 1974.” Above that, red typed letters read, “Unsealed October 11, 2018 by Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell, United States District Court for the Distric... |
| Oct 17, 2018 | Did the President’s Tweets Lead Prosecutors to Seek the Death Penalty for Sayfullo Saipov? | Much has been written, on Lawfare and elsewhere, about the dangers of presidential interference with the Justice Department and, in particular, the special counsel’s investigation. But the broader implications of President Trump’s willingne... |
| Oct 15, 2018 | Jaworski Road Map to be Mostly Unsealed | One month ago, the three of us filed a petition in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for the release of the so-called “Watergate Road Map”—one of the last great still-secret Watergate documents. Last week, Chief Judge Ber... |
| Oct 12, 2018 | Federal Court Ruling in Georgia Shows Judges Have a Role to Play in Election Security | In the wake of Russia’s interference in U.S. elections, questions persist as to whether Russia changed vote totals and changed the outcome of the election. Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and the Senate intelligence committee... |
| Sep 14, 2018 | The Watergate ‘Road Map’ and the Coming Mueller Report | According to countless media accounts and President Trump’s own lawyers, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is writing some kind of report on allegations of presidential obstruction of justice. Exactly what sort of report this may be is unclear... |
| Jul 15, 2018 | Climate Change Is Real at the FBI—and Here is the Data to Prove It | Rank-and-file confidence in the FBI’s senior leadership has taken a sharp hit.
That’s the bottom line from the bureau’s latest “climate survey,” the results of which we obtained on Friday through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.... |
| May 22, 2018 | Climate Change at the FBI: Why We Sued the Bureau Last Week | On May 18, we filed a lawsuit against the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act for the results of the bureau’s most recent “climate survey,” an internal study that the FBI conducts each year. This suit follows a request that we filed la... |
| May 8, 2018 | Is the State Department Giving Money to President Trump? Let’s Find Out | A few months ago, I began working with Scott Anderson and Sabrina McCubbin on an interesting project: trying to discern whether the State Department was, quite literally, paying President Trump money. Today, having gotten no response from t... |
| Mar 23, 2018 | How Congress Should Respond to the White House’s Failures on Syria Transparency | Last week, one of us co-authored a summary of a new report on the legal and policy frameworks for the use of force and other national security operations required by Section 1264 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal y... |
| Mar 9, 2018 | Constitutional Limits on White House Interference in Specific Enforcement Matters | Late last year, in an interview with The New York Times, President Trump declared that he has the “absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.” In a similar vein, the president’s personal lawyer John Dowd has said th... |
| Feb 15, 2018 | The Syria War Powers Memo: Why It Matters | Last Friday, Feb. 9, Sen. Tim Kaine asked the Trump administration to turn over a legal memo prepared by administration lawyers in connection with the April 2017 missile strikes directed at Syrian regime forces. The existence of that memo c... |
| Feb 8, 2018 | Friends of the Court: A Suggestion for the FISA Court on the Nunes Memo | You wouldn’t know it from the endless public discussion of the Nunes Memo and the Democratic response to it, but the House of Representatives does not get to decide whether a FISA application is valid. Congress gets to decide what the legal... |
| Feb 5, 2018 | 'I Hope This Is an Instance of Fake News': FBI Messages Show the Bureau's Real Reaction to Trump Firing James Comey | When President Trump fired James Comey as FBI director last May, the special agent in charge of the Detroit field office, David Gelios, wrote an email to his staff:
I just saw CNN reporting that Director Comey has been fired by President Tr... |
