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The fight for accountability and oversight within privately owned ICE detention facilities is out in the open. Deaths, hunger strikes, and the horrifying conditions being experienced by the people detained within those walls are consistent topics of conversation in the public discourse. But instead of working to alleviate the problems and improve conditions, the Trump administration is…

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The UK's data protection regulator has criticized London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) after its officers handed a victim's stalker details about her new phone number and home address, among other failures. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) today issued the MPS with an enforcement notice [PDF] and a reprimand over the two incidents, which occurred in 2024. Enforcement notices include specific steps offending organizations must take to meet their data protection duties under UK law, while reprimands serve as official warnings concerning breached data protection laws. The ICO outlined two major incidents that were caused by failures at the MPS, but added that they were not isolated and "reflected wider weaknesses in MPS policies, procedures, and assurance arrangements for handling sensitive personal information." The first involved a man subject to an interim Stalking Protection Order (SPO), which restricted him from contacting his victim. An MPS superintendent authorized an application for an interim SPO in January 2024 concerning a man who had been arrested the previous year on suspicion of harassment and malicious communications offences. The man was also, at the time, subject to bail conditions that included a prohibition on contacting the victim and their friends and family. As a result of the man's actions, the unnamed victim had to change her phone number and home address. Despite warnings that all personal information had to be redacted from the copy handed to the defendant, officers included unredacted witness statements and other documents. These exposed the new address and phone number of the victim, and those of her friends and family members. Within days, after the man fled the UK, breaching his bail conditions, the victim reported to the MPS that the defendant had contacted her on her new phone number. A full SPO was issued in May 2024, and the stalker was arrested in July upon re-entering the UK. He was later charged with stalking offenses and imprisoned following a guilty plea. The second incident was a classic CC-not-BCC email blunder, exposing the addresses of 18 people connected to the UK Parliament who had been targeted in a honeytrap operation by "a malicious actor." The MPS emailed those affected by the honeytrap scheme to update them about the date by which the suspect would have to answer bail, but forgot to use the BCC function, exposing the target's email addresses to one another. The MPS reported the breach that day, acknowledging that recipients might be able to deduce one another's identities from their email addresses, although three of the accounts had recently been deactivated. The MPS told the Information Commissioner that there was "no reported detriment" as a result of the breach and no official complaints made, although it was aware that "some" targets were "displeased" that their names had been shared. One MP raised the issue in the House of Commons. The ICO said that regarding the honeytrap scheme, the officer who sent the email had not completed data protection training for over four years at the time, and their line manager had not completed it for nearly four years also. The ICO found that data protection training completion rates were low across the force, and the MPS has committed to improving them. Jo Stones, group manager of civil and cyber investigations at the ICO, said: "People entrust the police with some of their most sensitive personal information, often at moments when they are vulnerable or at risk. They have the right to expect that information will be handled securely. "In these cases, the Metropolitan Police Service failed to put in place the safeguards needed to protect people's personal information. One breach exposed a stalking victim's new contact details to the person she needed protection from. Another revealed the identities of people connected to a highly sensitive investigation. "These incidents were foreseeable and preventable. Our action makes clear that organisations, particularly those in the public sector handling sensitive law enforcement information, must have effective training, monitoring and assurance in place. Policies and reminders are not enough if they are not followed, checked and enforced." The Met now has 12 months to improve compliance with its data protection training requirements, aiming for 100 percent completion and following up with staff who miss the deadline. It must also review every three months how officers send emails to multiple recipients, consider more secure alternatives, and report its progress on training completion to the ICO. Earlier this year, the ICO served the Met's commissioner with a separate enforcement notice over failures to meet duties under the Freedom of Information Act. It followed a previous notice issued two years earlier, with which the MPS complied. ®

Abdul El-Sayed has won the Democratic nomination for the Senate in Michigan, narrowly defeating Representative Haley Stevens in a close contest.

Decision Desk called the race for El-Sayed Tuesday morning, projecting him as the winner with 48.52 percent of the vote to Stevens’s 47.47 percent.

El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and the former Wayne County Health Director, edged out Stevens despite her receiving heavy financial backing from groups aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. El-Sayed now moves on to the general election, where he’ll face Republican Representative Mike Rogers in November and have a shot at becoming the first Muslim U.S. senator.

This is a developing story.

As streamers compete with social media giants for viewer attention, Disney+ is partnering with TikTok to bring creator content to its app.

An AI cloud startup with backing from Nvidia and Michael Dell plans to open AI factories in Norway and elsewhere, targeting multiple gigawatts of capacity by 2030. Volta describes itself as a vertically integrated AI infrastructure business set up to finance, build, and operate AI factories. In other words, it is another rent-a-GPU "neocloud" operation like Nscale and CoreWeave, but one with some notable backers. Emerging from stealth mode, Volta said it had raised about $300 million across its seed and Series A rounds, reaching a valuation of $2.4 billion. Andreessen Horowitz and Nvidia led the latest round, with other investors including Michael Dell's family office. It also claims to have a $10 billion strategic partnership with an "AI lab" to build its AI factory located in Norway. This has been identified elsewhere as model developer giant Anthropic, which is said to be seeking access to Volta's compute resources over a six-year period. The Register asked for confirmation of this, and what that partnership comprises. Volta plans to develop the 133 MW facility with cryptocurrency miner and GPU cloud operator Bitdeer. The site is expected to use Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, presumably meaning the rack-scale infrastructure shown off by the GPU giant at the CES show earlier this year. "AI factory" is the industry's preferred term for a datacenter dedicated to training and running AI models. The Norway GPU barn is the first project within Volta's broader development pipeline, which it says exceeds 1 GW of capacity across North America and Europe. Volta says it intends to construct the sites using Nvidia's DSX reference architecture and software tooling, which cover the design, simulation, construction, and operation of AI factories. The technology includes digital twins that can model a facility before it is built. Perhaps in an effort to distinguish itself from the rest of the rent-a-GPU crowd, Volta claims rather grandiosely that it has created "the world's first fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform, extending beyond technology into capital formation." By this, Volta means combining infrastructure finance, datacenters, compute, software, and operations under one roof. It claims this will accelerate deployment and reduce financing costs. "Compute has become a new infrastructure asset class, with AI models and applications as the verticals built on top," said founder and CEO Ricard Boada. "Our ambition is to build The Utility of Compute so that compute works as reliably and invisibly as electricity, while being priced transparently and built to endure." Volta had not responded to our requests for further information by time of publication. Anthropic declined to comment. ®

Here’s what’s happening on Santa Cruz County roads this morning…

▼︎ new incidents

Road incidents as of 6 a.m. on August 5

• Highway 9 at Cascade Avenue in the San Lorenzo Valley has one-way traffic due to ongoing work. This closure is expected to last until Aug. 31.
   
• Alternating lanes are closed on Highway 9 at Riverdale Park in the San Lorenzo Valley because of bridge work. The closure is expected to last until April 30, 2027.

Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

The post Wednesday morning traffic: Highway 9 lane closures in San Lorenzo Valley for work appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Trump appointees have called for an aggressive ‘full suppression’ response to putting out wildfires. By Alex Brown for Stateline As millions of acres burn across the western United States, some wildland fire veterans are fearful that aggressive fire suppression tactics ordered by the Trump administration — coupled with extreme, fast-moving blazes — could put firefighters in danger as…

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North Carolina Representative Chuck Edwards has called it quits on his reelection race.

“After much prayer and reflection, I’ve decided to withdraw from my reelection campaign,” Edwards wrote on X early Wednesday morning. “I will complete my current term.”

The congressman’s sudden exit came after the House Ethics Committee recommended that he be censured for “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers.”

In a 25-page report published Monday, the committee listed out numerous occasions on which the married Republican had seemingly violated House rules relating to sexual harassment and hostile workplaces, revealing in detail how he made the women in his employ feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

The list included “intimate” and expensive dinners, casino dates, strip club visits, expensive gifts, massages, and an insistence on personally handling their yardwork or Christmas tree decorating—which Edwards skipped House votes to make time for.

Edwards even wrote and performed poetry for one of his female staffers, hired a singer to perform Ed Sheeran’s “Hills of Aberfeldy” at one of their birthday parties, planned full day excursions with them, and wrote personal notes expressing his “effusive affection.”

The committee report also noted that many messages were missing from Edward’s phone, including a photograph that depicted 30 different types of ice cream that he had delivered to one of his staffer’s houses, and her subsequent response that “this seems a bit excessive.”

The report found no evidence that Edwards had engaged in sexual activity or “explicitly propositioned” the women, but found plentiful evidence that he had repeatedly made his staff feel scared and uncomfortable with his behavior.

Yet Edwards’s exit from the race comes months after the legal deadline to do so (the deadline to withdraw was back in December). As a result, his name will most likely remain on the ballot come November, and any votes he receives will still be counted toward him, as explained by the state Board of Elections.

Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon Related | An ‘exponentially different level’ of billionaire spending in California…

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MacPaw is building a local version of its AI assistant Eney using Liquid AI's models.

Robinhood's latest financial instrument intends to let any retail investor feel like they, too, can make money by backing Y Combinator startups.

Coming into Election Day, Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary was widely expected. A blowout seemed possible. Instead, his victory margin will likely be less than two percentage points. (NBC News declared him the winner early Wednesday morning, but other outlets were still holding back.) But his triumph over Representative Haley Stevens, while far narrower than polls were predicting, is still a monumental event in both Democratic and national politics. And it sets up major tests for both the progressive and center-left wings of the party over the next three months.

El-Sayed did not deliver a resounding defeat to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and other parts of the center-left Democratic establishment who backed Stevens, as his supporters hoped. The election returns suggest that El-Sayed struggled with rural voters, in particular. Looking forward to the general election, that data has to worry Democrats, who tend to lose elections to Republicans because they are blown out in small towns.

That said, stepping back from the last few weeks, when El-Sayed’s victory seemed certain, this is still a huge win for progressives and a major defeat for the center-left. AIPAC spent more than $30 million to boost Stevens, a massive outlay for a Senate primary. Whitmer and many other prominent Michigan Democratic officials implored the state’s Democrats to back Stevens.

The center-left both in Michigan and nationally leaned into the case it regularly uses to defeat progressive candidates: electability. Stevens, centrists claimed, would have a better chance of winning in a general election than El-Sayed. That that argument didn’t fully resonate in Michigan, the swingiest of swing states, is a huge setback for the center-left. If El-Sayed wins in November, that electability case against progressives will be even more weakened, perhaps easing the path to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the party’s 2028 nominee.

Speaking of November: As I wrote recently, Democrats with fairly progressive records (Barack Obama, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin) have won in Midwestern swing states in the recent past. But what’s untested in swing states is 2020s progressivism that generally embraces the term socialist (although El-Sayed himself has said many times that he is not a socialist) and deep skepticism of American traditions and norms. It will be important for El-Sayed to emphasize populist economics and stances on other issues that most voters agree with, such as backing abortion rights and not funding Israel’s military. But this is not the time for either the candidate or his supporters to float more controversial ideas, like abolishing prisons or defunding police.

I was dismayed to see Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, another progressive, fumble recently when asked about her past comments criticizing the Thanksgiving holiday. Can El-Sayed and his supporters discipline themselves, the way that Mamdani and his camp did in the months leading up to the general election in New York last year? They need to.

The party’s center-left needs to show some discipline too. Many centrists really disagree with El-Sayed’s stances on Israel and other issues. Others probably don’t want to see El-Sayed win in Michigan, thereby further emboldening the party’s progressive wing. But they must keep in mind that a Senator El-Sayed will vote against Trump’s agenda far, far more than a Senator Mike Rogers. That’s what’s at stake here. And those stakes are really high. So airing their frustrations about El-Sayed, particularly attacking him from the right, will only help Rogers. Don’t do it.

It’s an earthquake in Democratic politics to have Bernie Sanders’s candidate defeat Gretchen Whitmer’s candidate in Michigan. But the real goal must be to keep Donald Trump’s candidate from winning this seat. Haley Stevens could have done that. But Abdul El-Sayed will get that chance. He’s electable. He just won an election. Now Democrats, center and left, in Michigan and beyond, need to do everything possible to get him elected in November.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have eked out a little more life for instruments aboard the veteran Voyager 2 probe thanks to a power-saving effort called the "Big Bang." The procedure involved switching several powered devices at once, turning some off and replacing others with lower-power alternatives while keeping the spacecraft warm enough to function. We don't envy whoever had to press the Send button and then wait to discover whether the commands had worked or left Voyager 2 out of action. The procedure appears to have succeeded and, according to NASA, "the savings provide power to keep its instruments operating for at least another year." Engineers plan to perform the same procedure on Voyager 1 in the coming months. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than Voyager 2. In 2027, it will be half a century since the probes were launched, and power is running low. The Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG) on both generate electricity by converting heat from decaying plutonium. The probes lose approximately 4 watts of available power each year, which, over half a century, means the spacecraft are running on fumes, electrically speaking. The spacecraft were built for five-year missions studying Jupiter and Saturn, but Voyager 2 continued to Uranus and Neptune before both probes entered their current interstellar mission. In 2018, one of the original mission scientists, Garry Hunt, told The Register that engineers had brimmed the spacecraft's tanks, just in case an extension was ordered. The longevity of the probes is a tribute to those who designed and built the spacecraft. Over the years, non-essential systems have been shut down to conserve power. Instruments no longer required following the probes' planetary encounters have long been turned off, and scientists have gradually shut down more of each spacecraft's original ten instruments. Voyager 2 has three instruments still running, and the Big Bang process has pushed back the point where another will need to be switched off, meaning it won't need to be done for at least another year. Without the update, an instrument switch-off would have had to happen before the end of 2026. Voyager 1 is down to two operating instruments. Its power level dropped unexpectedly during a roll maneuver on February 27, forcing engineers to act quickly – at least as quickly as is possible when commands take more than 23 hours to reach the spacecraft. NASA switched off the Low Energy Charged Particles experiment (LECP) on April 17, but hopes it might be restored after Voyager 1 has its own Big Bang moment. Voyager 2's LECP was turned off in March 2025. ®

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Bernhardt Tiede has diabetes and hypertension, and is obese. In the summer of 2023, he suffered a stroke in a Texas prison cell that court documents say regularly exceeded 110 degrees. If there were ever a person the state should flag as vulnerable to extreme heat, it’s him.

He is also the reason Texas has spent the past two years fighting a federal lawsuit, brought by Tiede, over air conditioning in its prisons. And this spring, right before trial, the state’s own heat-tracking system did for him what it’s done for tens of thousands of other people: nothing. Officials removed him from the case, successfully arguing before the court that a policy update meant he’d now get priority for a cool bed on account of his current age: 67. They got that result due to a state formula for determining who gets air conditioning. Not the diabetes. Not the hypertension. A number.

No score means no priority placement, no restriction list, no AC. You’re in the same building as everyone else, whether or not your body can handle it.

That number is the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s “heat-sensitivity score,” a rating a computer assigns based on medical conditions and medications that could make someone more susceptible to heat. It’s supposed to identify who’s medically at risk in a cell with no air conditioning. In practice, according to the federal judge who’s spent two years staring at how it works, it identifies almost nobody. Only about 10 percent of Texas prisoners have a score at all, even though the roughly 134,500 people the state incarcerates all face what Judge Robert Pitman called a substantial risk of serious harm from the heat.

Pitman found the system “in practice, arbitrary, inadequate, and ineffective,” and gave an example that should embarrass the agency more than it apparently has: A 90-year-old with hypertension could still fail to qualify for a score at all. Have the condition without whatever else the formula is looking for, and as far as the algorithm is concerned, you’re fine.

A two-week trial over this system, and over the state’s broader refusal to air-condition its prisons, wrapped up on April 9 in Pitman’s Austin courtroom. As of this week, he still hasn’t ruled. Texas is in the middle of another heat dome. And Tiede, whose stroke started this whole thing, was dropped from his own case before trial after TDCJ pointed to the policy update prioritizing inmates 65 and older.

Here’s what the heat score is actually supposed to do: It’s a legacy of Cole v. Collier, the litigation over conditions at the Wallace Pack Unit that settled in 2018. In that case, Judge Keith Ellison defined “heat-sensitive” broadly, covering people taking antipsychotic, anticholinergic, or diuretic drugs, along with anyone diagnosed with psychiatric conditions, obesity, diabetes, or hypertension, among other things. In August 2017, he ordered TDCJ to move everyone who fit that description into cooled housing.

Rather than treat that definition as a floor, TDCJ turned it into a gate, giving people who fit a certain description a score based on the judge’s demands. A score gets you “priority placement” for one of the prison system’s roughly 52,000 air-conditioned “cool beds.” That total is barely enough for a third of the people the state holds. Placement gets you onto restriction lists for wellness checks that they say may result in an AC bed. No score means no priority placement, no restriction list, no AC. You’re in the same building as everyone else, whether or not your body can handle it.

The gap between whom the score covers and who actually gets hurt is the whole story. The Texas Newsroom obtained autopsies for prisoners named in the litigation, and three of those reports named heat as a contributing factor in the deaths. John Castillo had a seizure disorder and went to the water cooler 23 times in the day before he was found unresponsive at the Hughes Unit; his core body temperature was 107.5 and his autopsy called high environmental temperature an important contributory factor.

Politicians are leaning on a scoring system that lets state officials describe the problem as smaller than it really is.

Patrick Womack was found at the Coffield Unit with a core temperature of 106.9 in a cell registering 96.6 degrees, hours after anyone had checked on him, long enough that rigor mortis had begun to set in. Elizabeth Hagerty told prison doctors she had heat rash covering her body and couldn’t keep fluids down; they sent her back to her cell, and she died two days later, a month short of release. Her autopsy listed obesity, diabetes, and elevated environmental temperature as possible contributors.

TDCJ’s position on all three is that heat wasn’t the real cause of death. Underlying conditions were. The agency does not count a death as heat-related unless heat was the primary or sole cause, which is a strange standard for a system whose entire heat-protection apparatus is built around identifying people with underlying conditions.

A 2022 study in JAMA Network Open put a number on the pattern: Researchers estimated that 13 percent of deaths in un-air-conditioned Texas prisons between 2001 and 2019, roughly 271 people, were attributable to extreme heat, an average of 14 a year. Lead author Julianne Skarha described it as a 30-fold increase over heat-related mortality estimates for the general US population. Not a single heat death occurred in the climate-controlled facilities. TDCJ’s own count is far lower, and it almost always is, because the score, the death classifications, and the agency’s institutional incentive all point the same direction: Fewer people counted as vulnerable means fewer people the state has to protect, and fewer deaths to attribute to a problem it says it can’t yet afford to fix.

And to be fair to Texas, the fix is genuinely expensive. TDCJ initially said it needs at least $1.1 billion to fully air-condition its 101 prison facilities, an estimate that by this year’s trial had climbed to $1.5 billion, with officials suggesting a complete build-out might not finish until 2033. Lawmakers did put money toward new cool beds in the last supplemental appropriations bill. But House Bill 3006, which would have required climate control in phases by the end of 2032, passed the House and then died when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick never assigned it to a Senate committee. It was the third consecutive session in which a prison-cooling bill failed to clear the Senate. Nobody in Austin is pretending this is easy or cheap. What they’re doing instead is leaning on a scoring system that lets them describe the problem as smaller than it is.

That’s the real function of the heat score. It isn’t a medical tool. It’s a legal one. It gives the state a number to point to, a process it can hold up in filings and hearings as proof that vulnerable people are being found and protected. Pitman’s finding that the process is arbitrary is really a finding that the number doesn’t mean what the state says it means. Bernhardt Tiede can have a stroke in a cell recorded to be above 110 degrees, sue over it, and still not carry a score by the time his own case reaches trial.

Plaintiffs have asked Pitman to order the entire system air-conditioned by the end of 2029, a deadline the state would then have to explain to a Legislature that has spent three sessions declining to mandate exactly that. Whatever he decides, the underlying design problem doesn’t go away on its own. A state can build all the cool beds it wants; if the formula deciding who gets one keeps failing the people standing in front of it, the beds don’t matter much.

River plans to build a new factory, launch additional models from 2027, and target profitability as it scales production.

Beacon CRM has confirmed it was hit by a cyberattack that exposed data belonging to a growing list of UK charities. The company, which markets its software to charities and has more than 1,500 customers, said its investigation remains ongoing. However, it appears that a substantial amount of customer data was copied, and Beacon is warning users to assume everything they stored on the platform was downloaded. "Currently, our investigation has confirmed that copies of database backups were made and likely downloaded by the unauthorized third-party," it said on Tuesday. "We have evidence that shows a spike in activity during the incident timeline symptomatic of data leaving our systems. "It is highly unlikely we will be able to ascertain any more granular detail regarding exactly what data this was and to whom it relates so out of an abundance of caution, you may want to assume that all data that you store in Beacon, including attachment files, has been downloaded." Beacon also warned that although customer data is encrypted, "it is possible that the unauthorized third party responsible for this incident was able to decrypt it." Customers should therefore assume the copied information was readable. Beacon did not answer any of The Register's questions, instead offering a statement that echoed the wording of its public FAQ pages. It did not comment on whether extortion demands were made, nor how or when the attackers got in. Beacon's information page says early evidence points to compromised credentials being used to access its systems. One affected charity said the company became aware of the attack on July 29. Beacon also said anyone with a paid account or free trial created before July 27 should assume that all data stored in it was downloaded. While the incident response folk do their thing, customers have been urged to investigate how badly they were affected. Beacon also reset every user's password and imposed stronger requirements on replacements. Charities hit Because Beacon CRM is a product specifically engineered for the charity sector, the bulk of those confirmed to be affected are UK charities. Among the higher-profile victims is the Molly Rose Foundation, a persistent campaigner on the UK's Online Safety Act. It said Beacon informed it of the situation on August 3, five days after the CRM company became aware of the breach. The foundation confirmed that personal data belonging to supporters, donors, and service users was affected. That includes names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, dates of birth, records of donations or payments made to the foundation, and other information supplied in connection with its services and activities. The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) did not identify individual victims, but said many Scottish charities use Beacon CRM. Other charities confirmed to be affected include: London-based homeless charity The Upper Room Chiswick House and Gardens Trust Victim Support (no victim data affected) Macmillan Cancer Support Jersey, per the Bailiwick Express Young person's charity Motiv8, according to Portsmouth News UK-Med PANS PANDAS UK, a children's charity for those with the PANS and PANDAS conditions, said that it was unsure whether its data had been affected, having abandoned Beacon earlier in the year. English National Ballet told The Register: "As one of Beacon CRM's customers, English National Ballet was informed on 3 August 2026 that an unauthorised third party had gained access to their system. "English National Ballet has not received confirmation that our data was directly affected, however as a precaution we have informed all contacts as soon as possible that their data could potentially have been accessed. ENB take data privacy extremely seriously. We are doing everything we can to reduce the risk of anything similar happening in the future." ®

Soquel Union Elementary School District students are first among the county’s public school students to start the 2026-27 school year.

Mitti Labs plans to expand beyond India and enter the Philippines and Indonesia while growing its carbon credits and agricultural data business.

WindBorne Systems has raised $37 million Series B round to scale its weather balloons and AI forecasts.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 5 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

As you’ve heard by now, Donald Trump’s effort to prosecute people for vandalizing his Reflecting Pool renovation crashed and burned when the facts showed the charges were bogus. Then it got weirder as Trump raged for days at prosecutors for refusing to bring the prosecution he had ordered up. Now, new leaks to reporters show Trump’s conduct here to be even more corrupt than we thought. How much worse might this get, and can a Democratic Congress rein it in?

We’re asking former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade to walk us through just how irregular all this really is and what can be done about it. Barb, good to have you back on.

Barb McQuade: Thanks, Greg. Good to be with you.

Sargent: So a former Olympian, David Hearn, and several others had been facing vandalism charges for supposedly ripping up the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, because Trump was badly embarrassed by the failure of his renovation of it. But then Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., dropped the case, admitting the problem was shoddy construction. Barb, can you just sum up how we got to this point?

McQuade: Well, it’s pretty shocking that these charges were ever filed in the first place. I looked at the charging document when it first came down, to try to understand what facts they were alleging. And it was the most bare-bones of an indictment you’ve ever seen. It was one sentence. And there are two parts of it that struck me as very difficult to prove.

One is that you have to prove that the person acted knowingly and willfully. That is, that they intended to do damage, that they acted maliciously. And the one that I always thought they would have problems proving is that they caused damage exceeding $1,000 in value.

Now remember the timing of this. This all happened long after the public became aware of the failures to the Reflecting Pool. I mean, the reason he said he went over there to check it out after a long bike ride is he wanted to see what the fuss was all about. And he saw all kinds of floating pieces of paint. And so now, whether he picked one up or he grabbed it or he pulled on it, you were never going to establish that he caused a thousand dollars’ worth of damage by what he had done. And so it struck me as really doomed from the start.

Nonetheless, Jeanine Pirro indicted this case, in my opinion, because it advanced Donald Trump’s false narrative that the reason his renovations to the Reflecting Pool failed were not because of his own mismanagement, but because of vandals. And so Mr. Hearn provided a convenient scapegoat, even though it meant perhaps ruining his life.

Sargent: So just to give you a sense of how angry Trump got when Pirro dropped the charges, listen to him raging over it to reporters. Here he’s talking about Pirro and then goes on to abuse a reporter who asks him a question. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): I think she choked because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department. And I guess she choked. I don’t know what the hell happened.

Reporter (voiceover): Are you reconsidering her role here?

Trump (voiceover): I don’t know what you—you don’t—you’re fake news. Don’t ever talk again. You’re fake news. One of the worst of the business.

Sargent: Barb, note how Trump says there, “they did it.” He really doesn’t understand that he doesn’t get to make that true by decree. I mean, there’s like a long history of presidents trying to corrupt DOJ in various ways, but here it’s just stated baldly that this one man gets to decide by fiat who’s guilty and who’s innocent, and the system’s supposed to just bend itself around that. Can you talk about this?

McQuade: Yes, it does seem that President Trump wants to call the shots, as we’ve seen with cases being filed against Jim Comey for seashells and Letitia James for mortgage fraud—cases that have fallen apart. He really seems to think that he can just demand that lawyers file indictments against his enemies and it will be so. And maybe if they follow his orders, they can file indictments, but they’re never going to get convictions unless they have evidence to prove each and every element of a crime.

That is, what the person did, what they were thinking, and any causation that the statute might require, as we saw here. I don’t know if President Trump doesn’t understand that, or if he doesn’t care, because you can really wreck somebody’s life just by charging them, even if ultimately the charges don’t stick.

And that’s why one of the principles of federal prosecution that was promulgated after Watergate is that prosecutors should bring indictments only if they believe the evidence is sufficient to convict a defendant at trial, and that that conviction can be sustained on appeal. You’re not supposed to just take a flyer, or let’s see what we can make stick. You have to believe you have the evidence.

Now, certainly no case is a slam dunk. Sometimes witnesses go sideways, or juries disbelieve, or juries nullify, but you have to believe you have the goods. It’s just impossible to imagine anybody ever thought they had the goods in this case. And Donald Trump, it seems, does either not understand it or, more likely, not care.

Sargent: Right. And then Donald Trump got so angry at her that she decided she had to go to the White House to talk him out of his fury. Sources have now leaked to CBS News that Pirro went to the White House this week with a box full of physical evidence that exculpated all those people of vandalism, in order to persuade Trump that the culprit was in fact bad construction. The meeting got heated, according to CBS.

Barb, can we talk about how crazy that is on just a lot of levels? First, the level of presidential interference, then Trump refusing to accept the facts, and then Trump apparently raging at her, despite being presented by his own prosecutors with direct physical evidence. Your thoughts on that?

McQuade: Yeah, it’s really a complete change from the way the Justice Department has operated in the post-Watergate era. In fact, most administrations, including Trump’s first administration, have issued memos reminding prosecutors that they are not to have contact about case decisions with the White House. That is both to prevent actual interference or even the appearance of interference with charging decisions on the basis of partisan politics.

Now, a president might direct priorities. They might say, I would like to prioritize immigration enforcement, or fraud enforcement. That’s fine. But when they’re talking about giving directives on specific cases, that is where it violates those norms of the past fifty years.

And the idea that Jeanine Pirro has to come over and say, look at this evidence, Mr. President, here are my receipts, I really did make the right decision—I mean, even William Barr, when he took the job as attorney general, said he did so only on the condition that President Trump not interfere with his decisions about charging cases, that he would base decisions on the facts, on the law, and the fair administration of justice, and Donald Trump would butt out. According to Barr, Trump agreed to that during that first term.

But this term he seems to have completely abandoned any pretense of that. And in fact, Todd Blanche has embraced it. He’s even said the American people should be grateful that the president is taking charge and very involved in these cases and is making sure his Cabinet is working hard. That’s not what he’s doing. He is injecting partisan politics into the rule of law.

Sargent: Well, The Washington Post reports on more leaks—that this whole thing has sparked tirades inside the White House. Barb, what’s funny about Pirro going over to Trump with physical facts is she thinks those will persuade him to come to his senses and stop raging at her. But this is the essence of it, Barb.

Trump is angry at Pirro for refusing to throw out considerations of fact. Trump is angry at Pirro for refusing his command to prosecute innocent people despite what the facts and the law dictate. So, like, evidence can’t change Trump’s mind by definition, right?

McQuade: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, and it really goes back to, I think, a couple of data points that provide real insight into his strategy. Remember when there was an effort to declare that the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud? And he was trying to convince Justice Department leaders to go along with that and make an announcement. And remember what he said is, just say there was fraud in the election and leave the rest to me.

Because what he really wants is some independent, objective, respected third party to validate his claims. He said the same thing to Volodymyr Zelensky. Remember when he wanted him to announce that there was an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden over, you know, energy sector election interference in Ukraine.

Sargent: I want to bring up something that Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said about this thing, because I think it really gets at the corrupt nature of it. After Pirro dropped this case, Burgum went out on Twitter and contested her dropping it.

He said the evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. We provided the U.S. Attorney’s office with expert and eyewitness testimony, et cetera, et cetera, right? What drives me crazy about that is Burgum, who is not Trump and presumably not crazy the way Trump is, is willing to attack Pirro for the act of following the facts and the law, and willing to attack Pirro for not putting Trump above those considerations of facts and law.

Trump’s lackeys will, like, sell each other out for a tiny bit of good favor from the despot. And of course that’s always, like, fleeting, and it’ll be followed by him turning on them at some point anyway. You can kind of see how the corruption seeps down from the top in that one Doug Burgum tweet.

McQuade: Yeah. Yeah, and the lack of integrity is appalling. And we know he’s wrong, because we’ve seen it. In the motion to dismiss this case, Jeanine Pirro’s crew didn’t just say we don’t have the evidence. They documented over 20 pages the evidence that they had received that demonstrated this failure. They talked about the company that was hired. They talked about their efforts. They talked about their failure. They talked about how it was overpainted, and why, and the dates and the problems and the peeling of the paint. So it isn’t just, you know, a one-sentence decision or motion. It is detailed facts over 20 pages.

And so it is really disturbing that someone like Doug Burgum, a Cabinet secretary, would be willing to make these statements really just to indulge Donald Trump in his fantasies. Everybody involved in this knows that these claims are false. But I suppose this is the way one stays in good stead.

I mean, earlier today we had the Senate Judiciary Committee voting on Todd Blanche, and Thom Tillis, for all of the good things he’s done to sort of put some obstacles in the way and answer some questions by the candidates—even he reverted to whataboutism, and talking about the weaponization of the Biden DOJ and the Russia investigation and all of that, Crossfire Hurricane, like, my gosh. And so I don’t know whether they really believe it or they are just catering toward the MAGA right.

Sargent: Yeah, it’s really hard to know what goes through the head of someone like Thom Tillis, who shows a lot of integrity and courage and then at the last second just throws it all away for nothing.

McQuade: For nothing. For nothing.

Sargent: This whole Reflecting Pool fiasco is completely buffoonish and a total embarrassment for Trump and so forth. And yet at the same time it’s deadly serious, right? It’s an indicator that Trump is getting worse with his willingness to just use DOJ as a weapon in whatever way he decides at any given moment.

And so what’s the worst-case scenario here going forward? We’ve got two more years at least of Donald Trump, presuming he serves the rest of his term, and potentially a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate—or just a Democratic House. What’s the worst thing that you anticipate happening with DOJ in the next two years? How bad could it get?

McQuade: Well, I mean, we could see more of these weaponized prosecutions. The seashell case against Jim Comey, the effort to investigate what they’re calling the grand conspiracy out of Florida. I mean, imagine charges against people like John Brennan or other members of the intelligence community who are simply serving their country, charges against Anthony Fauci. I mean, I think we could see charges on any of these fronts.

I also worry about how the Justice Department might try to interfere in the midterm elections. With, you know, they’ve tried all kinds of things already to obtain voter rolls. The president is trying to use the Postal Service to prevent it from providing absentee and mail-in ballots to voters. So I worry about that.

Sargent: There’s a lot to worry about. It sounds like you’re basically saying we can’t rule out the possibility that Trump will put innocent people in jail.

McQuade: Yeah, I think that’s right. I like to think that the system will work, and that ultimately, because of the rights that people have at trial—to a jury, to counsel, to cross-examination, to a fair and impartial judge, to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt as a legal standard, to appellate processes—that people will not go to jail as a result of unjust prosecutions. But I think their lives could be made into a living hell before that.

Sargent: Absolutely. You wrote this book. It’s called The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. Great title, that very much applies right here, unfortunately. What can a Democratic House, or a Democratic House and Senate, do to stop DOJ from bringing corrupt prosecutions against Trump critics, and against whoever the despot orders them to? What can be done?

McQuade: I think some very important things can be done to serve as a check on this administration. One is conducting oversight. And so they can have hearings to expose to the public some of what’s going on at the Justice Department. That’s incredibly important. They also have the power of the purse.

They have the ability to defund programs if they think the funds are not being spent in a responsible way. That includes the judgment fund. And this one has become—was once kind of a sleepy financial problem, but now I think has come in the news. What Congress does is it funds this huge pot of money called the judgment fund. And then it trusts the Justice Department to use its discretion and best judgment to dole out settlements, or to make judgments when there are verdicts in court.

But we rely on the Justice Department to act in good faith to serve the best interests of the United States of America. So if somebody gets hit with a postal truck and they break a leg, they assess the fair market value of that, lost wages, pain and suffering, injuries, medical bills, and the like, and they say, that was worth $100,000, here you go.

Now what we see is the use of the judgment fund to pay people like Michael Flynn and Carter Page. I think one of the things they could do is what they used to do, and that is to fund judgments on an individual basis. And if they find that the Justice Department is acting in bad faith, they could decline to provide those funds. So I think between oversight and the power of the purse, they have a lot of power there to rein in the Department of Justice. And of course, they also have the power of impeachment, which includes the power to impeach the attorney general.

Sargent: One last thought. A Democratic House and Senate—if Democrats win both, which is hard but not impossible—couldn’t a Democratic House and Senate essentially pass legislation that does things like the bills that Democrats passed during the first Trump administration, though they didn’t get anywhere, of course, because Trump was president?

Some of these bills did things like really build a real firewall between DOJ and the White House. Presumably a Democratic House and Senate could pass that kind of thing, challenge Trump to veto it, and then have a big political fight over these reforms, which I think would poll very well. What do you think of that idea?

McQuade: I do. After Watergate, there was a whole slew of reforms that came into play. Some was legislation, some was norms at the Justice Department. And I think there is great public appetite for that once again. And so it may be a different landscape now, after the Supreme Court has shown interest and support for this idea of the unitary executive, about what separation-of-powers legislation will be permitted. But I think it’s worth the fight to really test those boundaries.

I mean, Donald Trump has certainly pushed the boundaries of executive power. I think we need Congress to do the same, assert its own power, its own legislative power, so that we don’t have this failure of equilibrium that we seem to be in right now.

Sargent: And let’s remember, Donald Trump, if he loses one or both houses of Congress, he’s going to be even weaker next year. And so there would be a real chance to take on these fights and maybe win some of them.

Barb McQuade, always awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for all that.

McQuade: Thank you, Greg.