The Justice Department filed suit against Washington D.C.'s Office of Disciplinary Counsel to block bar proceedings against Jeffrey Clark and Ed Martin, two Trump allies facing professional discipline over conduct tied to the 2020 election, according to The Hill. Clark, a former DOJ official, was found last year to have violated professional rules by urging the department to intervene in Georgia's 2020 election results.

Senator Chris Van Hollen pressed FBI Director Kash Patel at a Senate hearing on his reported heavy drinking, internal leak investigations, and the use of polygraph tests on FBI employees, according to The Bulwark. The exchange included questioning about an alcohol "AUDIT test," with Patel offering combative and evasive responses throughout.

The Department of Homeland Security's general counsel published a column this week accusing U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose of running an 'intimidation campaign' — the charge arising from her referral of a government lawyer for a misconduct investigation, according to the New York Times.

The accusation is worth reading carefully: a cabinet agency's top lawyer is not arguing that the judge ruled incorrectly. The argument is that the judge had no right to enforce courtroom accountability at all.

That is not a legal argument. It is a political one — and it belongs to a tradition of executive branch actors who, when they cannot win in court, attempt to delegitimize the court itself.

The Justice Department warned states that declining to issue undercover license plates to Department of Homeland Security officers is unconstitutional, according to The Hill. Said DOJ Civil Division Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate: "Some states are refusing to issue license plates to federal law enforcement. It's dangerous, shameful, and unconstitutional."

The Justice Department is investigating suspicious trading timed to swings in the oil market, according to two sources familiar with the investigation cited by CBS News. The oil market has been volatile since Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to Gulf oil and gas exports, sending prices soaring.

Jho Low, the Malaysian financier accused by U.S. prosecutors of orchestrating the multibillion-dollar 1MDB fraud, has formally requested a pardon from President Trump, according to Bloomberg Politics. Low, who has been a fugitive since U.S. charges were filed in 2018, is alleged to have diverted roughly $4.5 billion from the Malaysian state investment fund.

FBI agents interviewed current and former CIA officers at Langley last week as part of a grand jury investigation targeting former CIA Director John Brennan over his role in the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference, according to NBC News. A 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation spanning three years, more than 200 witnesses, and over a million documents endorsed that assessment's findings as accurate — and special counsel John Durham filed no charges against CIA officers who oversaw it.

The Justice Department is targeting the Southern Poverty Law Center with legal pressure at a moment when current and former employees say the organization is already internally weakened, according to NPR. Said one unnamed current SPLC employee to NPR: the threat from DOJ compounds existing vulnerabilities inside the organization.

The Justice Department defended subpoenas issued to Wall Street Journal reporters tied to a February article reporting that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and other Pentagon officials warned President Trump about the risks of an extended military campaign against Iran, according to CBS News. Said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche: "Any witness, whether a reporter or otherwise, who has information about these criminals should not be surprised if they receive a subpoena about the illegal leaking of classified material." Dow Jones chief communications officer Ashok Sinha called the subpoenas "an attack on constitutionally protected newsgathering."

The Wall Street Journal disclosed Monday that it received grand jury subpoenas on March 4 demanding reporters' records connected to a February 23 story about General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and planning around the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran.

The subpoenas represent the Justice Department using its full criminal-investigation apparatus to identify the sources behind national-security reporting — a move with a specific and troubling genealogy in American constitutional history.

This is not the first administration to reach for this tool. It is, however, reaching for it in a political climate where the institutional guardrails that once slowed or stopped it have been systematically weakened.

Federal prosecutors indicted Synergy Marine and technical superintendent Radhakrishnan Karthik Nair on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, failing to notify the Coast Guard of a hazardous condition, false statements, and obstruction, according to CBS News. The indictment alleges Synergy improperly used a maintenance "flushing pump" to supply diesel to two of the MV Dali's generators for months before the March 2024 crash that killed six construction workers; an NTSB report had previously called that use "inappropriate."

The Justice Department issued subpoenas to the Wall Street Journal tied to a story about internal government deliberations on the risks of military action against Iran, according to the New York Times. Press freedom advocates raised concerns about the use of leak investigations to compel news organizations to identify confidential sources.

Cole Allen, charged with attempting to assassinate President Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, pleaded not guilty to all counts through his attorney, according to CBS News. His public defender Eugene Ohm argued it would be "wholly inappropriate" for Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to direct the prosecution, citing both officials' public statements presenting themselves as victims of the attack, including Pirro's CNN remark that she was "in that combat zone."

Former President Biden is preparing to ask a federal court to prevent the Justice Department from releasing audio recordings and transcripts of his conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, according to Axios. The Justice Department disclosed in a joint status report that it intends to release the redacted material to Congress and to the Heritage Foundation, which obtained the recordings through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Prosecutors have been leaving the Justice Department in the wake of the push to bring charges against former FBI Director James Comey, with others weighing whether to follow — and at least one significant case reportedly disrupted as a result, the Washington Post reports.

The pattern here is not about Comey. It is about what happens inside a law enforcement institution when leadership demands that it serve political vengeance rather than law.

The Justice Department filed denaturalization actions this week in federal district courts across the country against 12 individuals, alleging each lied during the naturalization process, according to The Hill. The cases span multiple jurisdictions and involve what DOJ describes as fraudulent misrepresentations on citizenship applications.

Fraud-based denaturalization is not new — courts have upheld it in narrow, well-documented cases. But the strategic signal here matters: DOJ is establishing procedural infrastructure and normalizing the denaturalization reflex under this administration. Twelve cases today is a proof of concept, not an endpoint.

Watch who gets targeted next and whether the fraud predicate holds up in each case under adversarial review. The play is to build a pipeline — legitimate cases now, looser standards later.

The Justice Department filed a complaint Thursday in the Southern District of Florida seeking to strip U.S. citizenship from Victor Manuel Rocha, a former American ambassador who admitted to spying for Cuba, The Hill reports. The government's theory: Rocha illegally obtained naturalization by misrepresenting himself during the citizenship process — making the denaturalization claim procedural, not punitive.

That distinction matters enormously. The administration is field-testing a legal pathway to revoke citizenship via civil complaint — no criminal conviction required beyond the underlying fraud in the naturalization process. Rocha is the easiest possible target: a confessed foreign agent, zero public sympathy.

Hardest case first, then expand the tool kit. That's the play. A DOJ that wins on Rocha owns a precedent it can cite against a much longer list of people who are not confessed spies.

A federal judge has scheduled a July 15 criminal trial for former FBI Director James Comey on charges that a social-media photo — seashells arranged with the caption "86 47" — constituted a threat against President Trump, per The Hill. U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan, a George W. Bush appointee sitting in New Bern, N.C., set a June 5 deadline for pre-trial motions, including Comey's anticipated selective-and-vindictive-prosecution challenge. Comey's previous criminal charges were already dismissed once.

The pattern here is not new. Jefferson's Justice Department prosecuted Federalist editors under sedition theory. Nixon's DOJ surveilled and harassed political enemies it labeled threats. Each episode required decades of institutional repair. What distinguishes this moment is speed: a sitting administration has moved from dismissal to re-indictment of the same target on an interpretation of "threat" so thin that a seashell photograph carries the evidentiary weight. The courts — Flanagan among them — are the remaining friction point.

Federal judges in Rhode Island have ordered a special counsel investigation into a Department of Homeland Security lawyer who withheld information about a migrant's international criminal charges, according to The New York Times (May 7, 2026). The misconduct finding came from the bench — not from DOJ self-policing — which is itself the tell.

Now DHS says it cannot locate the migrant in question. That is not a footnote. A lawyer conceals charges; the subject disappears; the department pleads ignorance. That sequence is either catastrophic incompetence or something worse.

The strategic read: courts are doing the accountability work that a captured DOJ will not. Judges forcing a special counsel over executive-branch lawyer misconduct is a pressure valve, not a solution — but it's what the system looks like when internal checks have been hollowed out. Watch whether the special counsel appointment survives the week.

Democratic Sen. Peter Welch (Vt.) and Rep. Dave Min (Calif.) sent letters Thursday to 17 pardon and commutation recipients, asking whether clemency was exchanged for something of value, according to The Hill.

The probe targets recipients Welch and Min say received clemency 'under suspicious circumstances' — a framing that puts the legal question of bribery, not just bad optics, on the table.

This is a minority-party investigation, which means no subpoena power. What it does have is a paper trail — and the strategic value here isn't a hearing, it's the responses.

The Justice Department has charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with fraud, accusing it of using a now-defunct informant program to funnel donor money to extremist groups, according to The Hill. The SPLC pleaded not guilty Thursday.

No verbatim quotes from SPLC leadership were available in the published summary.

The charge is novel on its surface. The use of a federal fraud indictment to disable a political adversary's fundraising apparatus is not.

Senate and House Democrats have sent letters to more than a dozen pardon and commutation recipients demanding financial records, lobbying contracts, and donor disclosures — building a paper trail around what they call "pay-to-play dynamics" in Trump's clemency operation, CBS News reports.

Said Rep. Dave Min: "Now the victims get hit twice, because not only are the people that defrauded them not serving their time — not paying their debt to society — they're literally not paying their debts to the people they defrauded."

The minority can't subpoena anyone yet. But the ledger they're assembling — Changpeng Zhao's $2.1 billion crypto deal with the Trump family, Trevor Milton's $3 million in campaign donations before a $680 million restitution wipeout, David Gentile's commutation erasing $15.5 million owed to 17,000 victims — is designed to be midterm ammunition.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told CBS News that the DOJ's prosecution of Trump critics — including former FBI Director James Comey and New York AG Letitia James — is not a retribution campaign, while simultaneously arguing the president has authority over every corner of the Justice Department.

Said Blanche, pulling out a pocket Constitution: "Article Two says, 'the executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States of America.' It does not say that the Attorney General stands off to the side."

He added: "To the extent that President Trump calls me and says that he thinks that we have a problem in this country... every American wants him to do that, and he should."

That's not a denial of political direction. That's the architecture of it, stated plainly.

Jack Smith, the former special counsel who prosecuted Donald Trump, told a private Washington audience last month that the Justice Department has been corrupted by Trump and his allies, according to the New York Times.

Said Smith: DOJ leaders are "targeting people for prosecution to please and impress the president."

That's not a critic on cable news. That's the lawyer who ran the federal cases against Trump — speaking on the record about what the department has become.

The FBI searched the offices of Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas on May 6, NBC News reports — targeting one of the chamber's most powerful Democrats and a central figure in the state's recent redistricting effort.

No charges have been announced. The nature of the underlying investigation has not been publicly disclosed by federal authorities.

The tactical read: a federal law enforcement action against a sitting Democratic state legislator who holds direct authority over how congressional and legislative maps are drawn lands with strategic weight regardless of what the underlying facts ultimately show. The question isn't just what the FBI found. It's who benefits from the search itself becoming public.

The Justice Department is closing its nearly two-year criminal investigation of Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles. Per WTVF, the evidence will be returned or destroyed without FBI review. Whatever you think of Ogles, the precedent matters: investigations into members of Congress now resolve based on whose team you're on, not on what the evidence shows. That is not how an independent justice system works.