Inside the legal plans by foes of Donald Trump and Project 2025 to fight his second-term agenda
CNN
If Donald Trump is elected, he’ll take office next year having learned the lessons of four years of legal battles in his first term.
If Donald Trump is elected, he’ll take office next year having learned the lessons of four years of legal battles in his first term, during which inexperienced personnel, slapdash policymaking and his own indifference to how the federal government worked made his agenda especially vulnerable to legal challenges. The 2024 Republican nominee already has a clear idea of how he’d jumpstart a second term, with plans to immediately enact hardline immigration policies and to dismantle civil service protections for thousands of federal employees. His allies, including the influential conservative organizations that have participated in the endeavor known as Project 2025, have crafted policy papers and vetted potential Trump-aligned staff that could swiftly be hired to the federal government, so that his vision could be quickly and effectively implemented. (Trump himself has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 but many of his policies and goals overlap.) “Honestly, the Trump administration was often sloppy in the way they rolled out these executive orders, including the first Muslim travel ban,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson told CNN, referring to the Trump ban on migrants from several Muslim-majority countries that was the target of one of nearly 100 lawsuits brought by the Evergreen State against the Trump administration. Ferguson said his office was “building the airplane as we were flying it” at the time. Now, the Washington Democrat – who is running for governor – has spent the last year pulling together a legal playbook so that his successor will be ready to hit the ground running in the event Trump wins again. Those kind of preparations – researching case law, writing memos, shifting around staff – are being done across the country by liberal advocacy groups, blue states and other organizations that fought Trump in court. They’re thinking through the kinds of plaintiffs they’d recruit, where in the country they’d file their lawsuits, how they’d shape their legal arguments to adjust for how the judicial landscape has changed in the last several years and bulking up on litigative staff.
Speaker Mike Johnson is a political survivor, weathering crisis after crisis since his unlikely ascent two years ago.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan are well matched, rhetorically forceful opposites. And they have been clashing for more than a decade over an increasingly relevant question of presidential power: How easy should it be for the president to fire the heads of independent agencies?
The Army gynecologist described in a recent lawsuit as a “predator in uniform” is now being held in the Bell County Jail in Texas, “after apparently violating conditions of liberty imposed by his commander,” according to an Army spokesperson.
Brian Walshe on Thursday came face-to-face for the first time with the man who had been having an affair with his wife before her death, as he took the stand to testify in Walshe’s murder trial.
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Texas to use a congressional map that will boost President Donald Trump’s effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress, blocking a lower court decision that found the new boundaries were likely unconstitutional because they were drawn based on race.
The US military carried out a strike Thursday on a suspected drug boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four people on board, according to a social media post from US Southern Command.
A grand jury voted against indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James after being asked to look at the mortgage fraud case against her a second time, according to multiple people familiar with the development Thursday.
National Guard troops deployed to Washington, DC, can remain there for now, after a federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily froze a judge’s ruling that would have soon required them to leave the city’s streets.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bad week just got worse. That’s after the long-awaited release Thursday of an inspector general’s report on his sharing of highly sensitive military attack plans on the unclassified app Signal earlier this year.
President Donald Trump has hired a new architect for the White House ballroom amid disputes between the president and his architect originally contracted to complete the project, several sources have told CNN.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth risked compromising sensitive military information that could have endangered US troops through his use of Signal to discuss attack plans, a Pentagon watchdog said in an unclassified report released Thursday. It also details how Hegseth declined to cooperate with the probe.
If nothing else, the controversy over the Trump administration’s second strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean has surfaced a long-overdue debate about its already legally dubious first strikes.
Two top House lawmakers emerged divided along party lines after a private briefing with the military official who oversaw September’s attack on an alleged drug vessel that included a so-called double-tap strike that killed surviving crew members, with a top Democrat calling video of the incident that was shared as part of the briefing “one of the most troubling things” he has seen as a lawmaker.