Washington — The Ford Motor Co. employee who heckled President Donald Trump during a January visit to the company's Dearborn Truck Plant. still has his job and "has no discipline on his record," a union official confirmed Monday.

"TJ, we got your back," United Auto Workers Vice President Laura Dickerson said during a Washington, D.C., speech Monday morning. She was referencing TJ Sabula, a 40-year-old UAW Local 600 line worker at the factory who called Trump a "pedophile protector."

Trump responded by flashing his middle finger and twice mouthing, "F--- you,” at Sabula. The president also mouthed a popular catchphrase from his days on reality television: "You're fired."

"Well, this ain't 'The Apprentice,'" Dickerson said, referencing the NBC program that featured Trump.

Ford declined to discuss Sabula's status Monday. "This is a personnel matter, and we’re not going to comment,” company spokesperson Jess Enoch said in a statement.

The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

A federal judge is expected to soon rule on whether President Donald Trump’s planned $400 million White House ballroom project can proceed, zeroing in on whether the administration’s plan to rely on private donations allows it to bypass congressional approval.

Trump has argued that the approach spares taxpayers the expense, but the dispute has instead highlighted a lack of transparency over how the project is being financed. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, congressional Democrats and watchdog groups have questioned an arrangement that relies on donations from corporations with business before the federal government, funneled through a nonprofit intermediary that stands to collect millions of dollars in fees, to fund the most significant alteration to the White House in decades.

Leon has said he may rule this month on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s challenge to the project. As the decision approaches, watchdog groups have scrutinized the administration’s fundraising effort, arguing that it exploits gaps in federal disclosure rules that Congress should tighten......

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) concluded that at least 22 companies involved in the ballroom project should have disclosed their donations in lobbying filings but did not.

“The public deserves real transparency around who is contributing and how much they are giving, but that is not what we are seeing,” Matt Corley, CREW’s chief investigator, wrote in an email.

Those concerns also have been taken up by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), who has pressed the Trust for the National Mall — a nonprofit that is managing donations for the White House ballroom project — to clarify its role and specify the donations it has received. In a letter sent to Warren and shared with The Post, the organization declined to offer details about the gifts, but said that it stands to collect between 2 and 2.5 percent of each donation as part of its management fee. The planned $400 million project would be the largest in the organization’s history.

In a major setback for the Trump administration, the Supreme Court, in an unsigned opinion on December 23, declined to stay a lower court order barring the federal government from deploying the National Guard in Chicago. While welcome, the ruling is also in some ways narrow and kicks down the road many important issues. One of those issues, to my mind, is whether to rethink the presumption of regularity from which the federal government has long benefited as a litigant.

First, however, a few paragraphs on the ruling generally. To begin with, it conspicuously breaks the pattern by which the Court keeps granting the Trump administration stays of lower court rulings that restrain the administration’s ambitious assertions of presidential powers, thus allowing the power assertions to continue pending later court action. The split was 6–3 with a few wrinkles (Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority but would have decided the case more narrowly. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not join the strongly written dissent by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas and instead dissented more narrowly.)

The majority’s logic appears to carry over to some of Trump’s other deployments of the National Guard, and a week later, the administration announced that it was ending Guard deployments in Los Angeles and Portland, which had come under similar rebuffs at the lower court level. The terse majority opinion places much weight on an issue few initially saw as critical: how to interpret the use of the term “regular forces” in language empowering the president to federalize the Guard if he is “unable with the regular forces” to execute federal law. It also speaks the language of dry textualism rather than philosophical vision; Adam Unikowsky writes to explain why he sees that as a good thing.

Jack Goldsmith has offered a plausible analysis of some of the other issues in the case. Briefly: Trump retains many options not addressed by the Court; the statutory interpretation issues that the Court kicked down the road are quite complex; and the Court has not tipped its hand as to where it will come down on the inherent protective power theory cited by Trump and his backers as an argument for not needing any statutory basis at all for at least some of his troop deployments......

What is the presumption of regularity? An important multiauthored article at Just Security explains that it

is a judicially created doctrine with a long and contested history. The doctrine affords the executive branch a distinctive advantage not enjoyed by private litigants. It generally instructs courts to presume, unless there is clear evidence to the contrary, that executive officials have “properly discharged their official duties” and that government agencies have acted with procedural regularity and with bona fide, non-pretextual reasons.

For reasons both procedural and substantive, this convenient presumption helps the government prevail over many legal challenges and escape scrutiny entirely on others. Perhaps (or perhaps not) at some point in the past, the conduct of America’s executive branch was so upright and beyond reproach as to make judges feel comfortable in presuming good motivation and lawfulness. But this past year? The Just Security survey compiles dozens of instances over the past year in which the executive’s representations to courts or actions in connection with them have been in bad faith, motivated by retaliation, arbitrary or capricious, in defiance of court orders or established law, or—again and again—baldly untruthful. Others have compiled shorter lists, sometimes based on the government’s misconduct before individual judges such as James Boasburg (D.D.C.) and Paula Xinis (D. Md.); I assembled a few in my piece on contempt of court way back in May 2025.

The Kremlin’s financial situation is becoming increasingly dire and could come to a head in a matter of months as oil revenue shrinks while President Vladimir Putin shows no intention of ending his war on Ukraine.

Russian officials have been warning Putin with growing alarm that a financial crisis could hit by the summer, sources told the Washington Post. They pointed to weak oil revenue, which crashed by 50% in January from a year earlier, and a budget deficit that continues to widen, even after Putin hiked taxes on consumers.

A Moscow business executive also told the Post that the crisis could arrive in “three or four months” amid spiraling inflation, adding that restaurants have been closing and thousands of workers are getting laid off.

The economic strains go back to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago. As sanctions took hold and Putin mobilized the economy for a prolonged war, a tight labor market and high inflation forced the central bank to keep interest rates high. Recent easing has failed to prevent spending declines in several consumer categories.

The Justice Department is taking steps to throw out Stephen K. Bannon’s conviction for defying a congressional subpoena about the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, its latest shift in a legal position to benefit a close ally of President Donald Trump.

In a Monday legal filing, the department asked the Supreme Court to send Bannon’s case back to the district court, where the U.S. attorney filed a separate motion seeking to dismiss the charges against him.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche characterized the move, in a statement, as a course correction from “the prior administration’s weaponization of the justice system.”

Bannon, a top Trump strategist who left the White House in 2017, served four months in federal custody in 2024 after a jury in U.S. District Court in D.C. found him guilty of contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena from the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Trump last year pardoned more than 1,500 defendants who were charged in that event, in which a mob of his supporters disrupted the vote count to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Trump has also directed a purge of prosecutors and federal investigators who worked on those cases.

Now, with only nine months before the midterm elections, Trump is plotting to prevent Democrats from taking control of Congress. He started by trying to rig congressional maps through midcycle partisan gerrymandering. When that failed, his Department of Justice sought access to state voter files and seized ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. Now he is advocating for a Republican-led federal takeover of elections in blue states.....

Shortly after the 2025 elections, I published a list of seven voting laws every blue state should enact. While I stand by all seven, I want to highlight three:

1. Ban third-party voter challenges and other forms of vigilantism.

States must prohibit anyone — including the federal government — from challenging a person’s voter registration or right to vote. For years, Republicans have compiled private voter databases to challenge voters they want removed from the rolls. Now, the federal government is attempting to do the same. This practice of allowing voter challenges should be banned outright by every blue state.

2. Provide criminal and civil remedies for voter intimidation.

States must enact new laws that provide stronger protections against voter harassment and intimidation. These laws must allow for both civil and criminal remedies and cover a broad range of threats. Federal laws are not broad enough to address current threats. Existing state laws often fail to account for newer intimidation tactics. States need to adopt the broadest measures possible.

3. Revise and strengthen election-certification laws.

We must recognize that the weakest point in our election process is often the post-election counting and certification phase. Blue-state certification laws must be updated with modern language that unambiguously defines certification as a ministerial duty. These laws should allow private parties and state officials to sue to compel certification and impose criminal penalties on election deniers. State courts should also be empowered to certify elections when election officials fail to meet their obligations.

None of the D.C. grand jurors who heard the Trump administration’s pitch on why they should indict Democratic lawmakers over a video urging members of the military and intelligence communities to uphold their oaths believed the Justice Department had met the low threshold of probable cause, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

It’s exceedingly rare for a federal grand jury to reject prosecutors’ attempts to secure an indictment, since the process is stacked in the government’s favor. Federal grand juries need a minimum of 16 members to have a quorum, and they max out at 23 members. Just 12 grand jurors need to agree that the government had probable cause to indict, a threshold much lower than the unanimous “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard that a petit jury needs to convict.

In 2016, the Justice Department investigated more than 151,000 suspects, but grand juries returned just six “no bills,” per DOJ statistics. The vast majority of assistant U.S. attorneys will go their entire careers without being rejected by a grand jury like this. As NBC News previously reported, the lawyers who attempted to bring the case are political appointees, not career prosecutors.

It’s unclear if the office of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro will push forward and try to indict the Democratic members again.

Bannon’s other serious legal problem came to the fore a year earlier when the podcast host and former White House strategist reported to a federal prison after having been found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress as part of the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack. After serving a four-month sentence, he was released shortly before Election Day 2024.

In theory, that represented the end of the dispute, but in practice, it wasn’t quite that simple: Bannon and his lawyers continued to challenge his conviction, taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping to have the case overturned. After the high court justices asked the Justice Department to weigh in, my MS NOW colleague Jordan Rubin highlighted the unusual developments that followed:

On Monday, the day that the DOJ’s high court response was due, it didn’t file a brief opposing Bannon’s petition, as the government routinely does when criminal defendants petition the court. Rather, the DOJ told the justices that it was making a motion in the trial court to dismiss Bannon’s case, and it asked them to vacate the appeals court ruling against him and to send the case back so it can be dismissed in the lower court.

“The government has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” prosecutors said in their Supreme Court filing.

In other words, Bannon wants his conviction overturned; the justices asked the DOJ for its perspective; and Justice Department officials effectively replied, “Sounds good to us.”....

And therein lies the larger point. Bannon had his day in court, he lost and he was held accountable. Trump’s Justice Department is on board with undoing his conviction, apparently for the most obvious of reasons: The defendant is allied with the president.

This keeps happening. If you’re a convicted criminal whom Trump likes, you get a pardon. If you’re an accused criminal whom Trump likes, the charges against you evaporate. And if you’re a criminal who wants an earlier conviction overturned, and Trump looks favorably on you, the president’s Justice Department will endorse your endeavor.

For years, Republicans were obsessed with the idea that the United States had entered an era of a “two-tiered” system of justice. As it happens, they had the right concern about the wrong president.

On the anniversary of his second inauguration, Donald Trump wrote online that he wanted his administration to focus more on “talking about the murderers and other criminals” that “the Department of Homeland Security and ICE … are capturing and taking out of the system.” The president apparently meant what he said — and he hasn’t stopped repeating the talking point lately.,,,,,

What GOP officials refuse to acknowledge, however, is that the talking point isn’t true. CBS News reported this week:

Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News.

The official statistics contained in the DHS document, which had not been previously reported publicly, provide the most detailed look yet into who ICE has arrested during the Trump administration’s far-reaching deportation operations across the U.S.

The CBS News report hasn’t been independently verified by MS NOW, but a variety of media outlets have run related reports in recent weeks and months, emphasizing the simple fact that, as The New York Times recently summarized, “The vast majority of immigrants arrested have no convictions for violent crime.”

A recent report from the Cato Institute similarly found that of all the people booked by ICE since Oct. 1, only 5% of them had a violent criminal conviction — and of those with any kind of criminal conviction, most had been found guilty of misdemeanors, including traffic convictions.

If Trump were “totally focused on … really bad criminals,” the country would be having a very different kind of conversation. Reality, however, is stubborn.

Indeed, that’s the American norm across agencies, departments and jurisdictions. State troopers don’t wear masks. Neither do FBI agents. U.S. marshals don’t wear masks; sheriffs don’t wear masks; judges and prosecutors don’t wear masks; and Secret Service agents don’t wear masks.....

By and large, Republican policymakers don’t seem to care, though they keep struggling with the same obvious question: Why should ICE agents have the kind of secrecy that’s at odds with the American tradition, Americans’ attitudes and the standards of every other person who works in American law enforcement?

REP. STEIL: Some Dems demands put at risk the safety of members of law enforcement

CNBC: You mean like taking off their masks and having a badge that shows who they are?

STEIL: Well, they're known to their supervisors

CNBC: No other law enforcement officials in the US are allowed to wear masks

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-02-09T13:32:42.812Z

....Pressed on why ICE agents are receiving special dispensation, Steil added that immigration agents are subject to a unique threat environment that includes being doxxed.

That might sound vaguely compelling, but the details matter. MS NOW contributor Philip Bump explained:

What the Department of Homeland Security has long argued is that this is dangerous for the officers. Assaults against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents surged in 2025, we have been told. Agents must protect their identities in order to keep themselves safe from this uptick in hostility and violence.

A review of DHS and ICE press releases since January 2025, though, indicates that this theoretical scenario has never actually occurred. At no point in time has an officer been seen conducting his work, identified and subsequently attacked. While there have been threats issued against agents and incidents of off-duty harassment, there are no known incidents in which an officer was assaulted while off-duty because he was identified as a federal agent.

But while GOP officials continue to search for a talking point that stands up to scrutiny, spare a thought for appointed Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, who suggested some federal immigration agents are wearing masks for warmth.

FOX NEWS: When it comes to masks & federal agents, is that something Republicans will stand firm on?

HUSTED: That's something for the president, and Tom Homan, & DHS to determine what's safe. It's been below 0 in Mpls. If you're going to be doing work outside, having a mask on is a practical issue

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-02-10T14:32:17.050Z

“It’s been below zero in Minneapolis,” he told Fox News on Tuesday morning. “If you’re going to be doing work outside, having a mask on is sort of a practical issue.”

It’s the sort of comment that makes one wonder: If Democrats proposed banning masks on agents starting in June, would Husted and his GOP colleagues consider it?