The Dictatorship

Why Judge Boasberg’s ruling on DOJ’s Jerome Powell investigation is bigger than one case

Published

3 weeks ago

March 18, 2026

Mar. 18, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT

The most important part of Chief Judge James Boasberg’s ruling quashing Justice Department subpoenas served on the Federal Reserve was not simply that he blocked them.

It was that he refused to suspend common sense. He read the subpoenas against the public record that produced them. He took President Donald Trump at his word. That is what made the opinion so important.

Judge Boasberg did not begin with dry procedural throat-clearing. He began with Trump’s own attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and the broader campaign of presidential and White House pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.

For too long, courts have often maintained an artificial separation between presidential rhetoric and executive action.

He quoted Trump calling Powell “TOO ANGRY, TOO STUPID, & TOO POLITICAL, to have the job of Fed Chair.” He cited another post calling Powell “one of the dumbest, and most destructive, people in Government.” He noted Trump’s statement that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” and his threat that if the Fed did not cut rates, “I may have to force something.”

That was not decoration; it was the architecture of the opinion. From page one, Judge Boasberg made clear that motive was not some side issue here. Motive was the case. The subpoenas arose from a Justice Department investigation into supposed cost overruns in the Federal Reserve’s multiyear headquarters renovation project and into Powell’s congressional testimony touching on those renovations. On paper, that was the inquiry. In reality, Judge Boasberg concluded, something else was going on.

Judge Boasberg wrote that there was “abundant evidence” that the dominant, if not sole, purpose of the subpoenas was to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the president or resign and make way for someone who would. On the other side of the scale, he said the government had offered “no evidence whatsoever” that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the president. By the end of the opinion, that judgment hardened even further: The government had produced “essentially zero evidence” of criminality, and its stated justifications looked like “a convenient pretext” for another unstated purpose.

That is an extraordinary thing for a federal judge to say about the Department of Justice.

This was not a close call. It was not a case in which prosecutors pushed the envelope and got reined back in. It was a finding that criminal process had been used as pressure rather than law enforcement.

And the way Judge Boasberg got there was the real story. He did not invent improper purpose. Rather, he looked at what was already in plain view. Trump spent months attacking Powell, demanding lower rates and making his desired outcome unmistakable. He said, “Anybody that disagrees with me will never be the Fed Chairman!” He said, “I want to get him out.” He said he would “love to fire his ass.” He said Powell “should resign.”

A political appointee then floated the Fed renovation issue as a path toward investigation and possible removal. After that, the U.S. Attorney’s Office opened a criminal investigation on that very theory and served subpoenas on the Federal Reserve.

Judge Boasberg looked at that sequence and refused to act naive.

He was right to.

For too long, courts have often maintained an artificial separation between presidential rhetoric and executive action. The president says what he says. Prosecutors do what they do. Judges examine the narrower legal record and resist attributing too much significance to the political atmosphere outside the courthouse. But there comes a point where that posture stops looking disciplined and starts looking unserious.

From page one, Judge Boasberg made clear that motive was not some side issue here. Motive was the case.

When a president has repeatedly identified the official he wants pressured or removed, made his desired outcome unmistakable and then his Justice Department shows up with a paper-thin theory aimed at that same target, a court does not have to pretend those events are unrelated. Judge Boasberg’s opinion suggested that at least some courts may be losing patience with that formalism.

What made the opinion important was not just that Judge Boasberg drew that inference here. It was that he did so openly, in a way that may signal a broader judicial willingness to read executive motive more realistically in politically saturated cases.

That is not judicial activism. It is common sense.

And Trump’s response since the ruling only reinforced the point. In a post after the decision, Trump attacked Judge Boasberg personally, called him a “Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge,” said he has been “‘after’ my people, and me, for years,” claimed the ruling had “little to do with the Law, and everything to do with Politics,” and said Judge Boasberg should be removed from cases involving Trump and his administration.

That mattered because it underscored the precise interpretive move Judge Boasberg made in the opinion. The judge treated Trump’s public words not as background noise, but as evidence reasonably bearing on motive and pretext. Trump’s reaction did not undercut that reasoning. It strengthened it.

It also said something larger and more troubling about the DOJ.

The government was given the chance to substantiate its claims and chose not to. Judge Boasberg was left, as he put it, with “no credible reason” to think prosecutors were investigating suspicious facts as opposed to targeting a disfavored official.

That is not just a loss. It is a collapse of confidence.

And it matters all the more because of what a subpoena is. A subpoena is the point where political pressure becomes legal compulsion. It is the government bringing the authority of criminal process into the room.

That is why misuse of subpoena power is so dangerous. It can impose burden, stigma, cost and fear long before any indictment, and it can intimidate even when no charges are ever filed. Judge Boasberg understood that. He did not treat these subpoenas as some technical skirmish over records. He treated them as part of an effort to pressure the chair of an independent central bank and, in his words, to “bulldoz[e] the Fed’s statutory independence.”

That is why this ruling matters beyond Powell and beyond the Federal Reserve.

Judge Boasberg did not just quash subpoenas.

He modeled a more realistic way for courts to evaluate politically freighted exercises of state power.

And if more judges start doing the same, this opinion will be remembered as more than a rebuke in one ugly case. It will be remembered as an early sign that courts were no longer willing to separate presidential coercion from the legal machinery deployed to carry it out.

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.

The Dictatorship

Newly created Polymarket accounts bet big on US-Iran ceasefire in hours before Trump’s announcement

Published

16 hours ago

April 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Newly created Polymarket accounts bet big on US-Iran ceasefire in hours before Trump’s announcement

NEW YORK (AP) — A group of new accounts on the prediction market Polymarket made highly specific, well-timed bets on whether the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire on April 7, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits for these new customers.

These bets were made even though, in the hours before a two-week ceasefire was announced on Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric had escalated sharply and there were few signals that a ceasefire deal was imminent. Early in the day Trump had issued a warning on social media that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not meet his demand to open the Strait of Hormuz by his 8 p.m. ET deadline.

An analysis of publicly available blockchain data from Polymarket, using the crypto analytics platform Dune, shows that at least 50 accounts, or wallets, placed substantial “Yes” bets Tuesday before Trump announced the ceasefire in a Truth Social post at around 6:30 pm ET. These were the first bets made by these particular wallets.

One of these wallets, created Tuesday around 10 am ET, placed roughly $72,000 in bets at an average price of 8.8 cents. The buy-in for each betting event ranges from $0 to $1 each, reflecting a 0% to 100% chance of what users think could happen. This Polymarket user then cashed out for a profit of $200,000.

Another, which joined the platform on April 6 and traded on this exact event, shows a win of $125,500.

Another wallet, created 12 minutes before Trump’s post, made $31,908 of “Yes” bets at 33.7 cents, and is estimated to have earned a profit of $48,500. The higher price for “Yes” at that time may have reflected the efforts late Tuesday by the government of Pakistan to get Trump to extend his deadline by two weeks.

There is also the possibility that these individual Polymarket users placed their bets expecting Trump to back down, given his habit during his second term to make bold threats only to retreat — a phenomenon his critics have derided as “Trump Always Chickens Out,” or TACO.

While some users took handsome profits, others must wait for payouts because Polymarket has labeled the April 7 Iran-U.S. ceasefire contract as “disputed,” given that Iran was still placing restrictions on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz and missile attacks in the region continued. That dispute could take 48 hours to resolve.

Public blockchain data cannot identify who controls the new wallets. Polymarket uses proxy smart contract wallets, meaning a single user can create multiple accounts. Only Polymarket has the internal data needed to determine whether these were new users or existing users opening additional accounts.

Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, who has introduced legislation to regulate prediction markets, released a statement Wednesday saying: “It’s highly unlikely that these are good-faith trades; it’s much more likely that these are insiders with access to information ahead of the public. Without some kind of restrictions, there is nothing stopping government or military officials from profiting from their positions.”

The trading pattern of newly created Polymarket accounts placing strategic, well-timed bets mirrors earlier episodes on the platform. Newly created accounts placed large wagers hours before the January capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. Similar clusters of accounts have also repeatedly profited from well-timed bets on military actions involving Iran.

Such bets have repeatedly raised questions from the public as well as members of Congress about whether some traders are using inside information to profit in these prediction markets. Bipartisan groups of senators as well as representatives have introduced legislation that would broaden the definition of insider trading to include prediction markets.

Even the two biggest platforms in the industry, Kalshi and Polymarket, have said they see a need to broaden the definition of insider trading on their platforms.

“This is why these markets need regulation,” said Todd Philips, a professor at Georgia State University who has written on prediction markets and the industry’s regulations. “We can’t have people trading with inside information and expect other traders are going to be OK being in these markets.”

_____

Keller reported from Albuquerque, N.M.

The Dictatorship

Trump administration looks to sanitize George Washington’s slavery history

Published

23 hours ago

April 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Trump administration looks to sanitize George Washington’s slavery history

Apr. 9, 2026, 5:39 PM EDT

The Trump administration’s fragile white ego is in focus yet again thanks to newly proposed changes for an exhibit in Philadelphia centered on George Washington and slavery.

The administration is being sued by the city over its efforts to whitewash Washington’s history of slave ownership from the President’s House Site, the nation’s first official presidential residence. The push has been put on hold by a judge who compared it to the censorship depicted in George Orwell’s book “1984.”

The attempted alteration of the exhibit came after a Trump executive order demanded a review of national parks and museums to bar any displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” Last year, Trump also lobbed a puerile complaint that Smithsonian musuems focus too much on “how bad” slavery was.

And all that kvetching provides context for the changes that Trump’s administration is seeking to impose at the President’s House Site — alterations that The Philadelphia Inquirer said places the first president’s slave ownership “in a more sympathetic light.”

The Inquirer flagged government renderings showing plans for new historical panels to be installed at the site, and it seems clear that the administration’s goal is to make Washington out to be a loving patriot or conscientious objector to slavery, rather than a racist slave driver.

First, note what the Inquirer said has been removed:

The panels taken down by the Park Service in January included displays titled ‘The Dirty Business of Slavery’ and ‘Life Under Slavery,’ as well as illustrations about the Fugitive Slave Act and Ona Judge, who was enslaved by Washington and later escaped.

So the administration wants to omit detailed references to Washington’s slavery history — which Black activists fought for years to include — while also promoting a whitewashed narrative that he was a fundamentally moral man despite the whole “claiming dominion over other human beings” thing. Per the Inquirer:

For instance, on one panel titled ‘Presidents Washington and Adams on Slavery,’ the Trump administration writes that ‘Caught between his private doubts about slavery and his public responsibilities as president, George Washington navigated a nation deeply divided over slavery.’

‘Privately, George Washington often expressed discomfort with the institution and a desire to see it abolished,’ the panel continued. ‘Yet as a Virginia plantation owner, his wealth and livelihood were deeply tied to it.’

And another example:

And later in the same panel: ‘Slaves living in the President’s House experienced a greater modicum of autonomy than elsewhere in the South such as to explore the city and sometimes even attend the theater, with Washington buying the tickets.’

When a censorship regime like Trump’s sees fit to tout a slave owner’s generosity — and the “greater modicum of autonomy” he purportedly granted to those he subjected to brutal bondage and forced labor — it leaves little doubt that the fundamental goal is to sanitize history, rather than teach it thoroughly.

A White House spokesperson told the Inquirer that the administration wants to acknowledge “the full breadth of our nation’s history” and that “no piece of history should be washed away.”

But “whitewashing” truly is the most apt descriptor for a plan that includes touting George Washington as some kind of selfless, principled gift-giver while brushing past, or deliberately omitting, details about his well-documented — and extremely lucrative — history of enslaving human beings.

Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.

The Dictatorship

Thursday’s Mini-Report, 4.9.26

Published

23 hours ago

April 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* Crisis conditions in Lebanon: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed on Thursday to continue striking Hezbollah in Lebanon, hours after he appeared to make a concession by saying his country would start talks with the Lebanese government about trying to disarm the Iran-backed paramilitary group.”

* In related news: “More than 80 countries — which did not include the U.S. — condemned Israel’s lethal strikes on Lebanon. … Several international leaders have condemned Israel’s intensified strikes on Lebanon, which killed more than 300 people yesterday alone, according to The Associated Press, citing the country’s health ministry.”

* This wasn’t a problem before the war: “Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei vowed today to tighten control over the Strait of Hormuz and claimed victory in the ongoing war between his country and Israel and the U.S. ‘We will definitely take the management of the Strait of Hormuz to a new phase,’ Khamenei said in a series of posts on X.”

* Inflation news: “Core inflation held above the Federal Reserve’s target before the recent surge in energy prices, according to a key gauge released Thursday that offers the central bank a snapshot of conditions leading into the Iran war. The core personal consumption expenditures price index, which excludes food and energy, rose a seasonally adjusted 3% in February, the Commerce Department reported. The all-items headline inflation measure increased 2.8%.”

* The good news is, the vaccine saves lives; the bad news is, the Trump administration doesn’t want us to know that: “The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed publication of a CDC report showing the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, according to two scientists familiar with the decision.”

* Even for this White House, her remarks were weird: “First lady Melania Trump denied any ties to convicted sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell on Thursday. … ‘The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,’ the first lady began in remarks delivered from the White House. … It was not clear who or which statements or reporting she was referring to.”

* On a related note, Donald Trump told MS NOW that he didn’t know about his wife’s press statement.

* Trump’s animosity toward the NFL has reached a new stage: “The Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether the National Football League has engaged in anticompetitive tactics that harm consumers, according to people familiar with the situation.”

See you tomorrow.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”