A top deputy to U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro acknowledged in a closed-door hearing this month that the Justice Department did not have evidence of wrongdoing in its criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve over the cost of its building renovations, according to a transcript of the court proceedings.

The prosecutor’s admission, which has not been previously reported, undercuts President Donald Trump’s claim that “there is criminality” in the $2.5 billion overhaul of the Fed’s headquarters overlooking the National Mall.

Attorneys for the Fed and the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. battled over the legality of two grand jury subpoenas at the center of the investigation during a sealed hearing March 3. A transcript of the proceedings was later unsealed. Both subpoenas were quashed this month by a federal judge, who described them as an illegal effort by the Trump administration to pressure Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell to lower interest rates or resign from the independent central bank.....

Pressed by Boasberg, Massucco-LaTaif also said “we don’t know” what statements from Powell’s congressional testimony were false, adding that “there are certain areas that he addressed that caused concern,” according to the transcript....

Boasberg said in his ruling to quash the subpoenas that the U.S. attorney’s office had provided “essentially zero evidence” of a crime and had declined an offer to show him evidence in private, without attorneys for the Fed being present. “Indeed, most members of the Committee that Powell testified before — including a majority of each party’s members, as well as the Committee’s Chair — have said that they do not think he committed any crime,” the judge wrote.

Special counsel Jack Smith gathered evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump took many top secret documents that related to his worldwide business interests, and investigators considered this a likely motive for Trump concealing them at his Florida club after he left the White House, according to newly released case records.

The special prosecutor also had evidence indicating that after leaving office Trump had shown a classified map to passengers on a private plane, including his future chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and took at least one document that was so secret that only six people had authority to review it, according to a memo reviewed by MS NOW and cited by the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

Trump’s reason for taking hundreds of pages of classified documents when he left office in January 2021 — and then concealing them when the Justice Department subpoenaed him for their return in May 2022 — has been one of the larger mysteries of the case. FBI agents conducting an unannounced search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 discovered hundreds more pages of top secret records that Trump and his lawyers had failed to return to the government after claiming they had fully returned all classified materials.

In a January 2023 “progress memo” reviewed by MS NOW, Smith’s office discussed the possible motive after the FBI discovered that Trump held on to many documents related to his businesses.

“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” according to the memo, which tracked progress in the documents and election-interference investigations. “We must have those documents.”...

These new revelations emerged after Trump’s Justice Department released a tranche of records on March 13 to the House Judiciary Committee. Most of them deal with the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” probe, which examined how Trump’s campaign and Republican allies sought to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. But that tranche, Raskin said, included the January 2023 tracking memo from Smith’s office following both cases, which much of the Justice Department’s release focused on.

Heading into Tuesday’s state legislative special election in Florida, Republicans had reason to be cautiously optimistic. The race was in a Palm Beach district that Donald Trump won by 11 points in 2024 (it’s the same district where Mar-a-Lago is located), and only about a third of local voters are registered Democrats.

And yet, the contest turned into the latest in a series of red-to-blue flips. MS NOW reported:

Democrats flipped a Republican-held seat in the Florida state House, with Emily Gregory winning a closely watched special election Tuesday night in a district that includes President Donald Trump’s home of Mar-a-Lago, according to The Associated Press.

Gregory beat Trump-endorsed Republican Jon Maples in the 87th District, which includes Palm Beach. With almost all votes counted, Gregory narrowly led by 2.4 percentage points, or 797 votes, according to the AP.

The president may try to downplay the results, but it was earlier this week when Trump not only voted for the Republican candidate but also described the contest as “a very important Special Election” while endorsing the GOP nominee.....

The Downballot noted in its latest analysis that if the vote tallies in the Tampa area hold, Democrats will have flipped 30 seats from red to blue in special elections since Trump returned to the White House. Over that same period, the number of seats flipped from blue to red remains zero.

Some will no doubt argue that it’s best not to read too much into a special election held in the winter, several months before November’s races. It’s a fair point. But what matters is how the results fit into the broader political landscape. Republicans are tied to an unpopular president, a growing number of their congressional members are retiring, key elements of the GOP agenda are facing an intensifying public backlash, and they keep losing special elections, including in contests they expected to win.

If party insiders aren’t concerned about their standing ahead of this year’s midterm elections, they’re not paying close enough attention.

President Donald Trump's Pentagon faces a new legal threat after a Department of Defense official admitted to tossing up a word salad press policy in response to a court order.

On Monday, the Pentagon released a new press policy after a federal judge ruled that the agency's current policy is unconstitutional, The New York Times reported. Those policies included closing the Pentagon workspace used by journalists and requiring any journalist seeking physical access to the building to be escorted.

Cmdr. Tim Parlatore, a special adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, told the Times in an interview on Monday that the new policy essentially uses "more words to say the same thing and to foreclose creative misinterpretations."

Lawyers representing the Times cited that interview in a court filing on Tuesday seeking to have the Pentagon's interim policy thrown out.

"Rather than comply with the Court’s Order and accompanying Opinion, Defendants are contemptuously defying it—both in letter and spirit in a newly released 'interim' policy," the lawyers argued. "Among other things, for the first time in history, the Interim Policy bars reporters with press passes from entering the building without an escort, sets up unprecedented rules governing when a reporter can offer anonymity to a source, and leaves in place provisions that this Court’s Order struck."

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was angry about settling the Iran war.

Trump was taking press questions after swearing in new Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in the Oval Office when he gave a frank response about the status of the ongoing military conflict in the Middle East, which has now reached its fourth week and left 13 troops dead and 232 service members wounded.

This was the second time in two days that Trump had punted the blame to Hegseth over the war. On Monday, during a visit to Tennessee, Trump claimed that Hegseth urged him to pursue joint military strikes with Israel on Iran.

"I don’t want to say this, but I have to. I said to Pete and General Caine, I think this thing [the war] is going to be settled very soon. They said, 'Oh, that’s too bad.' Pete didn’t want it to be settled," Trump said.

Political commentator Brian Krassenstein shared the video on X, saying, "In other words our Sec. of War doesn't want peace, he wants war."

One of the president’s allies, however, shared some insights into a possible motivation for the policy. The Hill reported:

Former White House strategist and podcaster Steve Bannon said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers assisting with airport operations is a “test run” for the 2026 midterms.

During a conversation with conservative lawyer Mike Davis on his ‘War Room’ program, Bannon asked, ‘We can use what’s happening with these ICE [officers] helping out at the airports, we can use this as a test run, as a test case to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections, sir?[/i]’

His guest, predictably, wasted little time in expressing his agreement.

To be sure, reports like these come with caveats. Bannon is a prominent MAGA voice, but he’s not currently a White House official and he has earned a reputation as a blowhard who says outrageous things to get attention. There’s no reason to assume Bannon has any idea what he’s talking about in terms of likely future developments.....

In other words, radical ideas can pop up on “War Room,” but it’s not unusual to see those same ideas spread quickly in GOP politics.

What’s more, there’s a certain political logic behind the dynamic Bannon described. The administration may very well want Americans to grow more accustomed to seeing ICE agents — on public streets, in busy airports and elsewhere — so that it seems less jarring to see them similarly patrolling local polling places, looking for fraudulent voters who don’t exist in any meaningful way.

A few months ago, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker appeared on MS NOW and told Rachel Maddow that he was concerned about the Republican administration deploying federal agents to polling locations under the pretense of “protecting the vote.” The more Bannon endorses this approach, the more alarming his rhetoric becomes.

In late January, Donald Trump and his team deployed FBI agents to raid an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, walking away with what local sources called “pallets of ballots.” There was no credible reason to execute such a raid, which was driven by the president’s absurd election conspiracy theories, and it led to speculation about whether, when and where more ballots might be seized.

Roughly seven weeks later, The New York Times reported:

A Republican sheriff who is running for governor of California recently seized more than 650,000 ballots cast in a 2025 statewide election, prompting criticism from the state’s top election official, who said the sheriff’s concerns about fraud ‘lack credible evidence.’

The sheriff, Chad Bianco, on Friday said he was investigating allegations by an election activist group that vote tallies did not match the number of ballots received. … His office confirmed the ballot seizure and investigation on Sunday.

At issue is last year’s Proposition 50 election in the Golden State, which cleared the way for a redistricting plan that will benefit Democratic candidates, as a counter to a comparable plan in Texas that will benefit GOP candidates. Voters in California overwhelmingly supported the effort, approving the ballot measure by nearly 30 points.....

At its root, this is a story about a Republican official whose office has literally nothing to do with election administration, in his county or anywhere else, who decided to seize election materials in response to assorted conspiratorial complaints. This comes on the heels of Trump sending the FBI to seize election materials in Georgia in response to other assorted conspiratorial complaints.

The broader concern is that a template is taking shape, offering precedents for law enforcement to start making plans to seize ballots in areas nationwide — after or even during official counts.

What’s more, the more frequently this happens, the more Americans may be led to believe it’s normal and routine for law enforcement officials to seize and impound ballots — despite the fact that this is neither normal nor routine. Watch this space.

On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman ruled against the Pentagon’s restrictive press access policy, concluding that it violated the First Amendment and granted the government overly broad authority to control access to the press corps. The court decision fueled some hopes that conditions at the Defense Department might return to normal.

Those hopes were soon dashed. The New York Times, which helped take the lead in challenging the Hegseth-imposed restrictions, reported:

The Pentagon is closing the workspace used for years by journalists with credentials to cover the military, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, wrote in a memo to senior Pentagon leadership. A new area for the press will be set up in an annex outside the main Pentagon building, he said, and all journalists now seeking physical access to the Pentagon will require an escort.

In addition, the department is changing the wording of some of the rules for journalists requesting a credential, Mr. Parnell wrote.

As far as Hegseth’s team is concerned, the department can impose these restrictions, limiting access to media organizations, without running afoul of Friday’s court ruling, which the Pentagon is appealing.

The Times doesn’t quite see it that way. “The new policy does not comply with the judge’s order. It continues to impose unconstitutional restrictions on the press,” a spokesperson for the newspaper said. “We will be going back to court.”

The Pentagon Press Association similarly said that the department’s latest announcement “is a clear violation of the letter and spirit of last week’s ruling.”

It’s not exactly a secret that the partial government shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security has led to exceedingly long lines at many American airports, but the White House apparently has an idea to help improve matters. MS NOW reported:

President Donald Trump and top administration officials said Sunday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will arrive at the nation’s airports on Monday to handle security at exceedingly long lines driven by a shortage of TSA workers.

‘I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, ‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!’ Trump said on Truth Social.

On the surface, it’s likely that many air travelers would welcome the president’s “no more waiting” message, but as the policy advances, a handful of questions hang overhead......

2. What will ICE agents do at airports? This is arguably the most obvious of the questions, but there’s ongoing uncertainty about the answer. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s online announcement “came as a surprise to officials inside ICE and at DHS,” who spent the weekend “trying to figure out how it could work.”

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” White House border czar Tom Homan, who will lead the effort, conceded that the plan was hatched by Trump a day earlier and was “a work in progress” — a problem that became more acute when Homan said ICE agents would not be involved with security screening operations, right around the time Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy appeared on ABC News and said the exact opposite.....

5. Is this all about petty, partisan spite? On Monday morning, Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, endorsed the administration’s policy, telling Fox Business, “It’ll drive the Democrats crazy.”

Comer on airports: "I'm glad the president has put ICE in there for a multitude of reasons. It'll drive the Democrats crazy."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-03-23T12:36:14.007Z

With this on-air comment, the congressman said the quiet part loud. This isn’t about solving a problem, this is about playing political games. Or, as MS NOW contributor Philip Bump summarized, “[T]he ICE-at-airports thing is no more complicated than Trump knowing that his opponents hate ICE and thinking that they will therefore be tearing out their hair at this devious gambit.”

My advice for air travelers: Keep showing up extra early at the airport, because there’s no reason to assume that ICE agents’ presence will make a positive difference.

“You know, it was brought to my attention today that we’re the only country that does mail-in voting,” the Republican claimed. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating.”

As is too often the case, the president had no idea what he was talking about. For one thing, many countries in continents around the globe rely on postal balloting without incident. No matter how many times Trump says the U.S. is the only country that embraces such a system, reality keeps proving him wrong.,,,,

But there’s another element to this that’s just as notable: The president who wants to stop Americans from voting by mail also votes by mail. MS NOW reported that the website for the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections shows that Trump voted by mail in this week’s special election in Florida. The Washington Post similarly reported:

President Donald Trump, who is in the midst of pressuring senators to curb the use of mail-in voting, voted by mail ballot in Tuesday’s special election in Palm Beach County, Florida.

The Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections website indicates that Trump, who is registered to vote at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Palm Beach, ‘voted by Mail Ballot’ in a special election between Democrat Emily Gregory and Republican Jon Maples for a seat in the state legislature. A spokesperson for the office confirmed to The Washington Post that the ‘information [on the site] is accurate.’

If this sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. In Trump’s first term, the president also condemned mail-in balloting as “horrible” and “corrupt,” even as he continued to vote by mail.

Pressed on the conflict between his position and his record, the Republican told reporters, “Sure, I can vote by mail — because I’m allowed to.”

Six years later, Trump is still condemning mail-in voting for baseless reasons, he’s still voting by mail himself, and he’s also demanding that congressional Republicans impose new election restrictions that would prevent millions of Americans from doing what he’s done on multiple occasions.