May. 29, 2026, 8:56 PM EDT

A federal judge on Friday ordered President Donald Trump to address allegations that he committed fraud on the court in the settlement of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and whether the deal was designed to improperly benefit Trump and his allies.

In her order, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams cited a request filed Wednesday by 35 former federal judges calling on her to reopen the case and look into whether the out-of-court settlement “is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court.” In their court filingthe former judges say Trump and his co-plaintiffs failed to mention any plans of a settlement in their motion to withdraw the lawsuit against the IRS.

Earlier this month, Trump voluntarily withdrew his civil lawsuit against the IRS, in which he had sought $10 billion in damages from the agency over the leak of his past tax returns. Shortly after, the Justice Department announced it was creating an “anti-weaponization” fund as part of a settlement with Trump that establishes a pool of nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money earmarked to compensate people who claim to be victims of the government’s “weaponization.” Through an addendum issued the next day, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche also released Trump, his family and his companies from any tax liability accrued through mid-May.

“The Court was deceived,” the former judges wrote in their Wednesday court filing, noting that the Justice Department’s settlement was announced shortly after Trump’s attorneys filed to dismiss the lawsuit.

“That ‘settlement’ commandeers the contrived sum of $1.776 billion from the United States Treasury, to be handed out to recipients chosen by a commission effectively controlled by the President,” the former judges wrote.

The unprecedented compensation fund drew criticism from lawmakers from both parties.

House Democrats denounced the settlement as a “slush fund” and “super-pardon” created to benefit Trump and his family. Some lawmakers were concerned the funds would be awarded to people involved in the riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Blue Light News reported on a bipartisan House effort to stop the “anti-weaponization” fund.

This week, Rep. Mike Flood, R-Neb., told reporters that he did not sign off on the creation of the fund and insisted that no taxpayer money be given to “any January 6 insurrectionist.”

“I do not think one penny of any fund should ever go to any January 6 insurrectionist that was in the Capitol,” Flood said Tuesday. “I want to be very clear: I do not think we should be creating a fund for people that commit physical violence against law enforcement.”

Williams, appointed to the bench by then-President Barack Obama, gave Trump’s attorneys until June 12 to respond to the fraud allegations and address whether the lawsuit should be reopened over fraud on the court.

Carla Herreria is an editor for MS NOW’s breaking news and liveblog team. She was previously a senior assignment editor at HuffPost.

May. 29, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT

The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of Illinois has been in the news a lot lately — and for some disturbing reasons.

The Justice Department has reportedly opened an inquiry into a Chicago-based nonprofit backed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and is considering possible charges of money laundering. According to The New York Times, the inquiry is focused, at least for now, on Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic, which helped fund certain legal expenses in E. Jean Carroll’s civil cases against President Donald Trump. The U.S. attorney’s office has said it has not opened a criminal investigation into Carrollthe New York writer who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s, although the reporting makes clear that prosecutors are examining the accuracy of statements made during the civil litigation about outside funding.

At this point, even if Carroll is not formally the subject of the investigation, the criminal inquiry looks less like an ordinary money-laundering or perjury investigation than an effort to use federal prosecutorial power to revisit a credibility fight Trump already lost in court.

The lead prosecutor for these investigations is Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros. His office made headlines recently over its prosecution of protesters who came to be known as the “Broadview Six.” The cases collapsed amid extraordinary revelations about prosecutors’ conduct before the grand jury.

The office first downgraded from felony charges to misdemeanors and also reduced the number of defendants; last week it dismissed charges against the remaining individuals indicted last October after protesting outside of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Broadview, Illinois. Boutros said in court proceedings that prosecutors’ conduct during the grand jury process led to the dismissal.

The conduct was stunning: Prosecutors reportedly interacted with grand jurors outside normal proceedings, improperly vouched for witnesses, and even removed or sidelined grand jurors viewed as skeptical of the government’s case. At one point, the judge, who noted the conduct was redacted from grand jury transcripts she was shownremarked that she had never seen such conduct before.

For any U.S. attorney’s office — and especially for one with Chicago’s history and reputation — this was a major institutional embarrassment.

Boutros’ office could be on the verge of another high-profile debacle, even if Carroll is not currently a formal target of the inquiry and the focus remains on American Future Republic.

To be clear, a false statement under oath can matter. But the particulars here make a potential case against Carroll look exceptionally thin — and proving she knowingly lied under oath would be particularly tough.

Carroll testified in 2022 that no one else was paying her legal fees. Her lawyers later disclosed that some expenses were funded by American Future Republic. The funding issue came out before trial, and Trump’s lawyers seized on it. The trial judge barred Trump’s team from introducing that evidence, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit later upheld that ruling. The appellate court noted that Carroll had plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding and that there was no evidence she personally secured the funding, interacted with the funder or even knew the funder’s political position.

In 2023, a New York City jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages after finding Trump liable for sexually abusing her in a department store in 1996 and for later defaming her. In 2024, another jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages. The president has denied wrongdoing and appealed the awards.

Simply put, this was not hidden fraud discovered after the fact; it was disclosed before trial, litigated before the trial court and addressed by the 2nd Circuit.

Ordinarily, federal prosecutors do not convert into criminal investigations collateral credibility fights from civil litigation, especially ones already known to the trial and appellate courts. Then again, the DOJ is not typically led by a lawyer who previously was the president’s personal attorney.

Legally, the Carroll and Broadview Six cases are unrelated. But they point in the same institutional direction: federal prosecutorial power being used not simply to enforce law but to relitigate political conflict through the criminal process.

The broader pattern is hard to ignore because the targets are not random. Consider: James Comey, the former FBI director whom Trump fired and has long blamed for the Russia investigation, has been indicted twice by Trump’s DOJ. Letitia James, the New York attorney general who won the civil fraud case against Trump, was indicted on mortgage-related charges. After that case was dismissedthe DOJ tried — and failed — to secure a new indictment. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned public critic, had his home and office searched by the FBIand he was later indicted under the Espionage Act.

There are more: Sen. Adam Schiff, one of Trump’s central impeachment adversaries, became the subject of a DOJ mortgage-fraud inquiry. Another prominent Trump critic, former Rep. Eric Swalwell, was referred to the DOJ over mortgage and tax allegations. Lisa Cook is facing a DOJ mortgage-fraud probe as Trump tries to remove her from the Federal Reserveand the Fed received grand jury subpoenas amid an investigation of its then-chairman, Jerome Powellafter Trump publicly attacked the Fed’s renovation project and repeatedly criticized Powell over interest rates.

The through line is unmistakable: federal investigative power being steered again and again toward people who have investigated Trump, sued him, impeached him, contradicted him, restrained him or became symbols of opposition to him.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the former U.S. attorney in Chicago, once embodied a very different prosecutorial culture in the office that’s leading the investigation into American Future Republic. He once told the media about his job: “One day I read that I was a Republican hack. Another day I read that I was a Democratic hack. And the only thing I did between those two nights was sleep.”

That was the old ideal of federal prosecution: Both sides might accuse you of bias, but neither side could plausibly claim you were using the machinery of federal law enforcement as a political instrument.

Today, Fitzgerald — who prosecuted Republicans and Democrats and was respected precisely because he seemed fundamentally indifferent to partisan outcome — represents Comey against the federal government. In seeking the dismissal of Comey’s indictment, Fitzgerald and co-counsel wrote that “President Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute Mr. Comey because of personal spite” and that the indictment arose from “multiple glaring constitutional violations and an egregious abuse of power by the federal government.”

All of these prosecutions suggest the culture Fitzgerald represented — restraint, proportionality, respect for the grand jury, reluctance to turn marginal civil-litigation disputes into criminal cases — is no longer guaranteed, even in the offices most famous for it.

Duncan Levin is a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor who serves as a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and is a frequent contributor to MS NOW.

May. 29, 2026, 6:45 PM EDT

News recently broke that the United States is building a quarantine and treatment center in Kenya to send U.S. healthcare workers to, rather than bring them back to the U.S. treatment centers that have been used successfully in prior outbreaks. The U.S. government also issued travel bans to deny entry to individuals who were recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda or South Sudan despite objections from the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that travel bans are an ineffective response.

“We cannot and will not allow any cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” affirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

This makes no sense.

The current Ebola outbreak — more specifically, the Bundibugyo species of the virus — is a callback to the 2013-2016 epidemic in West Africa. Both outbreaks were unexpected, though in different ways. Prior to 2013, the affected West African countries (Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia) had never seen an Ebola outbreak. By the time the epidemic came to global attention, the virus had been circulating for months.

Like the West African outbreak, recognition of the current epidemic in the Congo was delayed at least 3 weeks (we are still unsure when the first case occurred). It also spread unrecognized into a neighboring country — in this case, Uganda. While the Congo is a veteran of 16 prior Ebola outbreaks and is generally very quick to recognize them, the uncommon Bundibugyo virus has only surfaced twice before — in the Congo in 2012 and in Uganda in 2007. The location of the outbreak was expected, but the virus species was not.

Several American medical charities were already established in this area, and at least two physicians have been exposed to the virus. But even before the outbreak began, the Trump administration’s response was hamstrung.

In February 2025, Elon Musk admitted the Department of Government Efficiency had accidentally canceled Ebola prevention. He said it was restored “immediately,” but government documents show otherwise. STAT News reported that foreign aid from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Congo in fiscal 2025 dropped to a third of what was provided in 2024. In the same period, funding from the U.S. Agency for Intentional Development was cut from $1.2 billion to $715 million. In the first three months of fiscal 2026, USAID sent just $67 million. And the Trump administration’s withdrawal from WHO in 2025 reduced the organization’s funding, further hobbling efforts in the area and leaving the U.S. on the sidelines.

Because of this, testing capacity was limited from the start. Most tests on hand were for other Ebola virus species, not Bundibugyo. Initial negative tests slowed recognition of the outbreak and have continued to make accurate diagnoses — necessary for isolation, quarantine and contact tracing — challenging.

These cuts “have left the region dangerously exposed”, International Rescue Committee DRC Director Heather Reoch Kerr said in a statement last week. According to Kerr, many areas lack adequate frontline support and basic personal protective equipment (like gloves, gowns, masks, eye goggles and shoe covers) meant to shield healthcare workers from viral exposure. She warned that inadequate surveillance means “the true scale of transmission may be significantly higher than current figures suggest” in an outbreak that already has the fastest growth on record.

Earlier this month, two American physicians, Peter Stafford and Patrick LaRochelle, were exposed to the virus. For LaRochelle, it was his second medical evacuation due to working Ebola outbreaks. The first time, in 2018, he was evacuated to the U.S. This time, LaRochelle and Stafford were instead sent to the Czech Republic and Germany, respectively. LaRochelle is again being monitored, while Stafford is receiving treatment for a confirmed infection.

Donald Trump was president the first time LaRochelle was evacuated. Prior to entering the Oval Office, Trump posted 95 times about the West African Ebola crisis. In a post on Aug. 1, 2014, he wrote“The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!” The next day, he added“The fact that we are taking the Ebola patients, while others from the area are fleeing to the United States, is absolutely CRAZY—Stupid pols.” Hours earlier, he had posted“The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our ‘borders.’ Act fast!”

These entreaties were absurd in 2014, but in 2026, in Trump’s second term, they are national policy. And they are just as wrong now as they were 12 years ago.

Ebola is a deadly infection, but not a highly contagious one. Viral transmission requires close contact with blood and other body fluids when the patient is showing symptoms of disease and feeling ill. In 2014, the U.S. had no viral transmission within specialized facilities that treated Ebola patients. The single transmission event occurred at a Dallas hospital, where two nurses unknowingly treated an Ebola patient. This sparked national outrage when an exposed nurse flew across the country during her incubation period — and ended up visiting my universityfrom which she had graduated.

Frantic news reporters interviewed employees at every stop the nurse made during her weekend travels in Ohio. Her parents voluntarily quarantined in their home under police guardand health authorities kept tabs on other close contacts. Not a single person developed Ebola. The nurse did not begin to feel ill until she arrived back home in Texas, at which point she was transferred to Emory University for treatment in their Special Communicable Diseases Unit. There was no significant “spread inside our borders,” as Trump prophesied.

Current healthcare workers treating patients in central Africa will have no guarantees of the specialized treatment Americans previously received at Emory and other U.S. locations. The refusal to repatriate exposed patients may understandably deter recruitment of medical personnel willing to travel to the affected countries, as many will be reluctant to “suffer the consequences” of their humanitarian efforts.

This may be the administration’s biggest own goal to date. As Rubio, then a senator, accurately argued in 2014the key to Ebola response is containing the outbreak at the source. This requires a surge of personnel who are willing to put their lives at risk to help others. Our government previously viewed such volunteerism as part of a social contract that included top-notch care back home if the worst happened and those medical personnel contracted the virus. That pact has been broken in lieu of a medical center that is not yet built or staffed in Kenya. Many locals oppose it (and a Kenyan judge has even temporarily suspended the facility’s operations). Recruiting adequate staff will be significantly more challenging.

Responses to Ebola outbreaks are never easy. They require coordination among many countries, nongovernmental organizations and community leaders. They often face challenging local conditions, including conflicts, distrust of Western medical personnel and general skepticism and inaccurate information about Ebola among affected populations. We need more funding and personnel available to assist the agencies already on the ground, and to follow protocols that have worked to end prior epidemics rather than change the game as it’s in progress. In 2014, Rubio called Ebola workers “heroes.” He was right then, and the Trump administration should treat them that way now. Otherwise, they are taking a grave risk with an already dangerous outbreak.

Tara C. Smith is a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University’s School of Public Health. Before that, she spent nine years in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, where she directed the college’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases.