Trump Team Wrecked by Judge for “Bad Faith” Efforts on Abrego Garcia

A federal judge slammed the Department of Justice for refusing to provide answers about the government’s efforts to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador.

In an eight-page filing Tuesday evening, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis overruled several of the government’s objections to answering questions or providing documents, writing that their failure “reflects a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.”

Lawyers for the DOJ failed to respond to a court-ordered request for information Monday, arguing that it had been made on a “false premise” that the government was required to secure Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador. The Supreme Court had ordered the government to “facilitate” his return. Crucially, Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, and the government has failed to provide any compelling evidence of his alleged gang affiliation.

In her filing, Xinis said that the government had “stubbornly” refused to provide “any basis” for the privileges it was attempting to invoke in its evasion of her questions.

For weeks, lawyers for the government had attempted to hide behind “vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege” to “obstruct discovery and evade compliance,” Xinis wrote. “Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this Court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.”

Xinis told the lawyers that they would have only 24 hours to assert any final privileges in the requisite detail.

“If Defendants want to preserve their privilege claims, they must support them with the required detail. Otherwise, they will lose the protections they failed to properly invoke,” she warned.

Xinis excoriated the government’s refusal to provide additional names of those involved in Abrego Garcia’s deportation as “willful and intentional noncompliance,” and overruled the lawyers’ claim that information about how he was placed in CECOT, the prison in El Salvador notorious for human rights abuses, was “outside the scope” of expedited discovery.

“This is particularly relevant to Abrego Garcia’s custodial status today, if for nothing else, the Plaintiffs are entitled to discover all relevant and probative evidence that undermines the Defendants’ incomplete and evasive answer that Abrego Garcia is in the ‘sovereign, domestic custody’ of El Salvador,” she wrote.

In a meeting with Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen last week, Abrego Garcia said he had since been moved to a different prison.

Donald Trump is backtracking on some of his wild economic moves.

The president said Tuesday that has “no intention” of firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, after days of insults and threats over whether Powell would cut interest rates. It’s quite a reversal from Trump saying Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough,” the week before. Still, Trump would like those rate cuts.

“I would like to see [Powell] be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates,” Trump said Tuesday while swearing in the new Securities and Exchange Commission chair. “It is a perfect time to lower interest rates.”

Trump also backed down from threatening China on Tuesday, saying that he wouldn’t seek to punish China any further in the Oval Office and telling reporters that tariff rates against the country would be lowered.

“[The rates] will come down substantially, but it won’t be zero,” Trump said, adding that “we’re going to be very nice, and they’re going to be very nice, and we’ll see what happens.” China appears to be reciprocating, with a spokesperson for the country’s Foreign Ministry telling reporters Wednesday that “the door for talks is wide open.”

It seems that the struggling stock market and panicked U.S. executives have persuaded Trump to modify whatever concepts of a plan he has for the economy, as every economic indicator spells disaster. Trump’s tariff whiplash, where he has alternated between raising and lowering tariffs, has caused market chaos for several weeks.

Instituting an astronomical tariff rate of 145 percent against China, one of the country’s largest trading partners, has not inspired confidence from American businesses, and China is holding firm on getting Trump to back down. Tuesday’s shift from the president indicates that he is fearful of what will happen if his current approach backfires.

Vice President JD Vance admitted outright on Wednesday that the United States is prepared to completely abandon Ukraine. 

“We’ve issued a very explicit proposal to both the Russians and Ukrainians, and it’s time for them to either say yes, or for the U.S. to walk away from this process,” he said from India. “We’ve engaged in an extraordinary amount of diplomacy, of on-the-ground work.

“The current lines, somewhere close to them is where you’re ultimately, I think, going to draw the new lines in the conflict,” Vance added, making it clear that Ukraine would have to give up territory to Russia.

This comes as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff decided not to attend the planned meeting between the U.S., Ukraine, and other European leaders, due to what Rubio’s spokesperson called “logistical issues.” 

The U.S. has been unilaterally trying to strong-arm Ukraine into a ceasefire with Russia, while the Europeans try to support Ukraine’s attempts to fight off the Russian invasion. These talks were supposed to be an attempt to bridge the gap between the U.S. and Europe and to make Putin negotiate on more equitable terms that don’t see him retaining large chunks of Ukrainian territory. But Vance just gave the Kremlin yet another green light. 

Elon Musk’s far-right turn as the head of the Department of Efficiency has apparently tanked Tesla’s earnings.

In a humiliating first-quarter report published Tuesday, Tesla reported that profits had crashed by a whopping 71 percent, falling to a mere $409 million, compared with $1.39 billion from the same quarter last year.

The company vastly underperformed compared to Wall Street’s expectations for per-share profit, reporting an adjusted earnings per share of 27 cents, well below the expectations of 41 cents.

Sales slipped dramatically as well, dropping 13 percent from the same period last year. The electric vehicles have become controversial symbols of Donald Trump’s administration and Musk’s cost-cutting antics at DOGE, making them targets of widespread vandalism.

Musk was reportedly considering stepping back as DOGE czar when his special government employee status ends next month, which should come as no surprise. The Washington Post reported that the billionaire bureaucrat was tired of “attacks” from the left.

Dan Ives, a Wedbush Security financial analyst, wrote to clients on Sunday that Musk pulling back from DOGE is the only way that Tesla can recover, according to Bloomberg.

“Musk needs to leave the government, take a major step back on DOGE, and get back to being CEO of Tesla full-time,” Ives wrote. “Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla … and anyone that thinks the brand damage Musk has inflicted is not a real thing, spend some time speaking to car buyers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. You will think differently after those discussions.”

This latest earnings report may have been the wake-up call Musk needed. On a call with investors Tuesday, Musk reportedly said that he was planning to cut down on his time spent working with DOGE to two days a week starting in May.

Several employees in the Environmental Protection Agency spent their Earth Day learning that they needed to find new jobs.

Hundreds of staffers in the department’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were laid off as part of a reduction in force Tuesday, as were employees working on environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in regional offices.

In February, environmental justice staffers were placed on administrative leave and some of the agency’s probationary workers were fired. Now, 280 workers involved with environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion will be terminated, with 175 other EPA workers being assigned to new jobs. It’s all part of EPA chief Lee Zeldin’s pledge to drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.” According to an EPA memo obtained by NBC News, the reduction in force will take effect on July 31.

The EPA under Trump is ditching its mission of actually protecting the environment. The department rolled back environmental regulations last month along with parts of the Clean Air Act. In addition to the rollbacks and cuts, the agency also tried to cut grants to nonprofit organizations in an attack on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, set up by President Biden with the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. A federal judge temporarily nixed those plans last month.

The regulatory changes that Zeldin is pushing with Trump’s blessing will harm countless Americans, including Trump’s supporters. “It’s practically inevitable” that more people will get sick from reduced regulation and the loss of funding, one EPA staffer anonymously told TNR earlier this month.

It’s fitting that Tuesday’s layoff announcement fell on Earth Day because the Trump administration has shown that it cares little, if anything, about the earth. The new energy secretary, fracking executive Chris Wright, last month described climate change as the “side effect of building the modern world.”

The FBI has moved to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the EPA under the Biden administration, and Trump himself has claimed that climate change will provide more seafront property and is therefore better for real estate. The White House is celebrating Earth Day by making the planet worse.