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L.L. #22, May 13 [1]

['The Geogre', 'View Profile', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Andrew F Cockburn', 'The Boss Gomez', 'Ade', 'Bill In Portland Maine']

Date: 2026-05-13  

[Preface:] This is Laudable Links — a collection of stories, generally legal, that I have curated and think are worth readers’ time. Quality of both commentary and articles varies over time, and that’s one reason comments and writers are really needed.

This morning, I have a despair sandwich:

Donald Truthed at Brett and Amy, telling them that they owe him. After all, the Democrat justices are loyal, always, so they have to be loyal too. At The American Prospect, there is a slightly hopeful story of what might turn out to be helpful. Two non-profits that serve the freedom of the press are share holders in Paramount, and they’re using their large stock holdings to demand the sorts of information that an honest FCC and FTC would, “quids pro quo with Donald, such as.” A genuinely miserable story by Roger Parloff (not that he’s miserable; he’s one of the finest journalists out there) about a terrible assistant US Attorney misleading a judge and then DHS making a press release that endangers that judge’s life. It’s a true horror story.

Riders and mounts

You work for me, and don’t ever forget it. Thank you for your attention to this splatter.

Kathryn Rubino read, or her worst enemy forwarded to her, Donald’s “truthing” to the justices of the Supreme Court, and she writes, at Above the Law, “Trump To Gorsuch And Barrett: I Made You, I Can Break You.” The hot bean seed whose parasitic worm began twitching in his brain was “they denied my tariffman powers,” but, like the worm in question, Donald’s Mexican Jumping Bean did not stay in one place or roll one direction.

[Quote:|] it is really about something much simpler: Trump believes that the justices he appointed owe him their votes, and he is furious that they have not delivered them. … And also some likely tea-leaf reading about the birthright citizenship case that’s in front of the Court. [|End Quote]

Take for granted that the real occasion is the birth right citizenship case. Donald’s complaints about past injury, when they have specific names attached to them, are usually threats about the future. There is one thing made explicit by the stream of subconsciousness writing’s sequence, and that is Donald is trying to coerce birthright citizenship opinions — including by claiming to be insulted:

[Quote:|] a complaint that the Court didn’t acknowledge him when he showed up to watch the birthright citizenship arguments, and finally to a remarkable conclusion: “it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them.” [|End Quote]

Ms. Rubino is right that this social truth should make the news. It should be an outrage, not a yawn.

[Quote:|] We need to reckon with the ways it is genuinely strange and nakedly authoritarian, despite how commonplace it has become in the Trump regime. A sitting president publicly declaring that his Supreme Court appointees should vote for him out of personal loyalty — not because the law requires it, not because the Constitution demands it, but because he gave them the job — is not normal. It is, in fact, the specific thing that lifetime tenure was designed to prevent. But more to the point, this is not an isolated sentiment: Trump has been openly transactional about loyalty for his entire presidency, and the people around him have learned to perform it on cue. [|End Quote]

Perform, yes, but I’m not sure that “perform it” works. There is no way to merely perform loyalty to someone who demands totalitarian control. It isn’t loyalty, when it’s obedience, and it isn’t loyalty, when you don’t get to have an opinion of your own. THAT is Trumpism: obedience and being an employee of the most loathsome boss one could imagine — an irrational, malleable, bankrupt.

Ms. Rubino adds Donald’s statements about the Supreme Court THIS term. (Remember how he felt about it in 2020? He sang a song about the election cases, how “we’ll lose, and we’ll appeal, and we’ll maybe lose, and we’ll get to the Supreme Court, and we’ll win.)

[Quote:|] as we noted at the time, an earlier Truth Social eruption declared the Court “little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization” and said he was “ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed of them for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country.” He thanked Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh for their “wisdom and courage” while flaying the majority — which is a pretty clear statement of exactly what kind of “courage” he’s looking for. [|End Quote]

This ‘truth’ went on and on about how he won the election!

. . . Here’s the thing, and it seems to be a secret: How the President of the United States feels about the Supreme Court is irrelevant. Similarly, popular opinion is emphatically irrelevant to the Supreme Court. That’s the heart of our system. Our laws are supposed to protect the unpopular (1A, 8A, 5A) as well as the majority opinions. Our executive branch is supposed to be independent.

That is the heart of Donald’s rot. We can come up with an endless list of epithets — “Trumpism,” “populism,” “demagoguery” — but there is one term for what Donald J. Trump, Millionaire represents, and it’s totalitarianism.

A sprinkle of hope dust, along with hope that truth comes with it.

The shareholder value movement was a bad thing, I think most of us on the left agree. It led to corporate raiders and eventually the “Harvard MBA” model. However, there has been shareholder activism that has also come into being, when some large holder of stock organizes others to get active and force changes in board behavior. The boards have fought back, so it generally takes a substantial holding to do anything.

Whitney Curry Wimbish reports at The American Prospect that “Investors Using Shareholder Power to Challenge Corrupt Paramount Deal,” where the “investors” are the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders — both well-known press freedom non-profits.

The non-profits hold stock in Paramount, and so they want to get access to records in two acquisitions:

[Quote:|] [they] demand that [Paramount’s] owners David and Larry Ellison produce records related to two recent acquisitions: Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount, and Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The records could shed light upon whether the executives traded favors with the Trump administration to get approval for the deals. [|End Quote]

The author does not report how much money Freedom of the Press Foundation has invested in Paramount itself, but it has invested $21,500,000 overall, and the Paramount shares have dropped from nearly $20 in September to $10.78 this week. This gives the group standing to demand the right to investigate. The reason? It looks as if you have vastly overpaid for your acquisition, and therefore your long-term investors are getting burned by poor management or corrupt practices.

[Quote:|] Reporters Without Borders joined Freedom of the Press Foundation on the request. Using Delaware General Corporation Law Section 220, the two investors say in a communication with Paramount that they have the right to inspect the company’s books and records, to determine whether “executives may have breached their fiduciary duties or otherwise committed misconduct.”

Paramount legally must respond to the demand by Thursday. The company did not respond to a request for comment. [presumably by Am.Prospect.] [|End Quote]

The California attorney general, Bonta, was already discussing a multi-state anti-trust suit against the proposed merger. (The loss of Lina Khan is mourned everywhere but NYC, as her absence means that the federal Donald deal is approved, only to get blocked by state litigation — leaving nothing but layoffs and debt behind.)

As for corruption? The non-profits

[Quote:|] list the 2025 “side deal” that Skydance CEO David Ellison made with Trump to run between $15 million and $20 million in “public service announcements” if Trump dropped his defamation case against CBS News for a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that he didn’t like; the $16 million Paramount Global agreed to pay to a foundation for Trump’s future presidential library; the decision to make a Trump-aligned GOP donor the CBS “ombudsman” to eliminate “bias” and pledging to erase all diversity, equity, and inclusion practices; and a promise of “sweeping” changes at CNN, currently owned by Warner Bros. Discovery—including ousting employees Trump does not like—if Paramount acquired the competitor. [|End Quote]

Totalitarianism: It’s not corrupt, if it’s obedience, and it’s not a quid pro quo, if it’s an entirely visible price tag hanging from the waistband of the clown pants.

It’s terrible that the good news is the bad news of a paralyzed deal, huge debts, and job losses, but that beats the “synergy” of monopoly by Trump Media.

And now we go from the profane to the obscene.

I think Roger Parloff is one of the best old school journalists out there. Even though he does the tweety thing these days, when he writes an article, it has a good introduction, a clear line of development, and documentation of sources appropriate to journalism. Also, he hits that middle ground of vocabulary that we associate with American late-century newspaper writing. He’s now mainly writing for Lawfare, and his latest story — as in narrative and exposition — is “DHS’s Misleading Press Release Smears a U.S. Judge in Rhode Island.”

It is an encapsulation of everything wrong with a DOJ run like a Romper Room by a screaming fangirl and a DHS run like a French Guiana prison camp run by Cruella de Vil.

Let’s start with the Romper Room Lady and Cruella de Vil’s flying monkeys meeting. There is a Dominican national named Bryan Rafael Gomez who was picked up by ICE, which sought to deport him under the automagic authority of Alien Enemies Act. Gomez sought habeas corpus, and U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose, of the District of Rhode Island released him. So far, so automatic.

Now for the fun part.

[Quote:|] On April 30, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published—and still, as of the date of this article’s publication it has not corrected—a deeply misleading press release that maligns a federal judge. The headline reads: “Activist Biden Judge Releases Violent Criminal Illegal Alien Wanted for Murder.” The release quotes Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis commenting, “An activist judge appointed by Joe Biden released this wanted murderer back into American communities. This is yet another example of an activist judge trying to thwart President Trump’s mandate from the American people to remove criminal illegal aliens from our communities.” [|End Quote]

You see, the Dominican Republic DID issue a warrant for Gomez for a homicide. That’s as close as Cruella’s DHS gets to the truth, though. Know why? Well, the answer is in Romper Room and Cruella’s subordinate, Smeagol (ICEman Bovino. . . probably):

[Quote:|] DuBose never knew of the warrant’s existence. Also missing is the reason the judge did not know: because Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Bolan, who argued against Gomez’s petition for release, never brought that crucial information to her attention. The press release also neglects to mention that the reason Bolan never told her, as he has subsequently explained, is that the DHS’s own Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency instructed him not to. [|End Quote]

Got that? ICE told the Asst. US-A to not mention the warrant, so he didn’t. Thus, ruling solely on habeas and the Alien Enemies Act, the judge released Gomez, which teed up DHS to make her a target of domestic terrorists and Fox News feasts.

[Quote:|] Bolan’s papers responding to Gomez’s petition for release focused only on the nationwide legal dispute over whether detention for noncitizens who entered the country illegally is mandatory under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2) or discretionary under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a). (See “The Thousands of Lawsuits Challenging Trump’s Mandatory Alien Detention Policy.”) [|End Quote]

He was going to argue Romper Room Lady Pam’s fangirl position that Donald can do what Donald wants and there is nothing anyone can say otherwise. The AEA is supreme, so shutup. That issue had, of course, already been litigated, although perhaps not in Rhode Island. Regardless, Bolan was told to keep the factor that would have won the government’s position out of his mouth, so he did. He lost. Now she’s a crime-loving activist judge.

[Quote:|] after apologizing to DuBose, both in writing and at the May 4 hearing, Bolan and other members of his office asked the DHS to take down the misleading press release. . . Those efforts were in vain, however. The irresponsible, misleading, indecent, and potentially dangerous press release still appears on the department’s website. [|End Quote]

Now Bolan is not looking good. ICE is looking worse, but Bolan is catching an ethics complaint. Know why? Well, he told the judge that he didn’t KNOW about the homicide warrant. However, for two of the response filings by Bolan, ICE had itself publicized its “capture of murderers” (trials are for sissies!), including Gomez.

[Quote:|] Despite the DHS’s April 30 personal denunciation of DuBose for releasing an allegedly dangerous man into the community, the government did not file a motion seeking Gomez’s re-detention until four days later, on May 4. At the hearing that day, Bolan explained that, even after the DHS revealed the warrant’s existence in its April 30 press release (for at least the second time, we now know), he felt he had to wait for formal “use authorization” from his own ICE contacts. He did not receive that until May 3, a Sunday. He then moved to re-detain Gomez on May 4. On May 5, after a brief hearing, Judge DuBose granted that motion. [|End Quote]

Yeah, public safety isn’t and wasn’t a prime concern here.

The prime concern is OBEDIENCE. When you lose, fire, or quit-fire a good portion of your litigators, and when you stock your US-A offices with “loyal”ists, you get those who not merely obey, but who cannot act without orders. When there is nerve damage between the control center of the grasping hands or moving tongues, nothing moves or gets said. When the brain that manages the controllers of the mouths and hands is insane or clotted, the result is Pennywise running a circus matinee.

[Conclusion:] My similes weren’t so strong this morning — more squibs than shots, but at least I’m aiming at the right targets. Y’all please feel free to carve up the beasts in the comments yourselves.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/5/13/800037900/community/l-l-22-may-13/

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