THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

In mid-February, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was fighting to keep her job, she held an election-security event at a Homeland Security Investigations field office in Scottsdale, Arizona. In the past, she said, the state had been an “absolute disaster on elections,” and ensuring the security of election equipment was her responsibility. She also urged Congress to pass President Trump’s voter-ID bill. The message was less surprising than the location. HSI, the agency’s investigative branch, devotes most of its efforts to going after transnational drug cartels and human-trafficking networks, not to securing domestic elections.A week after the event, Arizona’s acting special agent in charge for HSI, Matthew Murphy, told the state attorney general’s office that his office was now probing the 2020 election in Arizona, according to a person familiar with the details of the meeting. A state investigator asked why the government was scrutinizing the results, given that they had already been litigated and investigated. Murphy made clear that he was acting on “direction from D.C.,” the person told us, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The HSI investigation in Arizona, which has not previously been reported, comes as the FBI has embarked on a separate election probe in the state. “This is not a joint investigation” with HSI, a person familiar with the FBI investigation told us. HSI headquarters and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice are coordinating the investigation, which is focused on identifying alleged voter-fraud activity and related potential enforcement actions, according to a person familiar with the effort.The Arizona investigations are part of the Trump administration’s escalating effort to vindicate the president’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Trump narrowly lost the contest in Arizona, and the state has since become a magnet for conspiracy theorists. Early last year, the administration ordered the creation of a small task force within HSI to probe election-fraud claims in other cities, according to a former HSI agent and one current HSI agent who described the assigned personnel as “unenthusiastic.” Last month, HSI investigators reportedly showed up at a high school in Dayton, Ohio, to investigate voter fraud. (HSI’s election work is not wholly without precedent; in 2020, for example, HSI investigators charged 19 foreign nationals with illegally voting in the 2016 election.) The Department of Homeland Security did… [TheTopNews] Read More.

When the first photo of 5-year-old Liam Ramos went viral in January, it became an instant symbol of the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign: his blue bunny hat, his Spider-Man backpack, his hunched shoulders, his scared eyes as ICE detained him and his father outside their home in a Minneapolis suburb.The second photo of Liam, a week later, enraged people who were now invested in his story: Lying on his father’s lap at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, about 70 miles south of San Antonio, Texas, he looked pale and lethargic. His eyes were open a tiny slit. His mother told reporters that Liam had a fever, was vomiting, and refused to eat.What struck me about the second image, and his mother’s update, was how familiar his transformation was. I’ve visited Dilley several times, and have seen many children go from bright-eyed to listless.With his move to Dilley, Liam became part of an ongoing national experiment in detaining immigrant families. George W. Bush’s administration briefly used the practice to provide respite to asylum seekers who had just crossed the border and had no plans for where to go next. But ICE officials soon argued that family detention should be used as a deterrent. In a former medium-security prison surrounded by razor wire north of Austin, young children and their parents wore jumpsuits and were confined to cells for up to 12 hours a day; it closed in 2009 after lawsuits and government inspections showed that children there were sick and malnourished.The Obama administration eventually opened Dilley on a remote patch of Texas flatland where temperatures can hit 90 degrees even in December. Its open-air layout of trailers was supposed to be more humane. But for years now, in interviews and court filings, families have described an emotionally crushing atmosphere, with revolting food, foul water, and a dangerous lack of medical care. They say bright bedroom lights that never turn off make it almost impossible to sleep, compounding their misery.[J. Weston Phippen: Is it an immigration detention facility or a child-care center?]In 2016, a government advisory panel recommended that ICE end the practice of family detention, and instead use monitoring programs that allow people with pending asylum cases to settle and work in the United States. But under Donald Trump, the agency has twice backtracked on plans to do that, arguing that housing children at Dilley is safe and necessary in order… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice serves as the criminal-justice framework for America’s armed forces. It covers offenses recognized by civilian law as well as crimes and infractions unique to the military, from insubordination to cowardly conduct. The code contains 158 articles; the Manual for Courts-Martial itself runs nearly 1,000 pages. It is an obvious truth that discipline, morale, and order can be maintained in military formations only if everyone—from four-star generals to the youngest “boot” privates—is held equally accountable for their actions.A cursory review of recent courts-martial suggests that the enforcers of military discipline don’t miss much. In December, a Marine private first class was convicted of “contempt or disrespect towards a noncommissioned or petty officer, and disrespect towards a superior commissioned officer in command.” The private was held in confinement for five days and was reduced in rank. In September, an Air Force lieutenant was convicted of engaging in conduct “unbecoming an officer” after drinking on duty and cursing superior officers. He was sentenced to 30 days of confinement and received a presumably career-ending reprimand. In November, a senior airman, a medical specialist, was found guilty of failing to “safeguard protected health information from unauthorized disclosure.” She was sentenced to one month of confinement, and received a temporary pay reduction and a reprimand. Also in September, an Army specialist was convicted of disrespecting a superior by “interrupting her when she was speaking and then walking away,” among other charges. A military judge reduced the specialist’s rank and prevented her from leaving her military facility for 14 days.Many soldiers are punished for infractions related to the handling of their weapons—the unfortunate Louisiana National Guardsman who recently left his rifle in the bathroom of a hotel bar could face a court-martial. And members of the armed forces are also punished for mishandling information. The military is necessarily unforgiving of those who violate operational security—“loose lips sink ships,” in the age-old shorthand. That is why seemingly quotidian bits of information—the dates and times that units are moving from one base to another, for instance—are held so closely. According to the UCMJ’s Article 92, the punishments for the release of unauthorized information vary, but could include two years’ imprisonment. A unit commander, operations-security guidance states, must “protect from unauthorized disclosure any sensitive and/or critical information to which they have personal access.” In October of last year, a retired Army colonel, Kevin Charles… [TheTopNews] Read More.

For decades, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s name has been used as shorthand for the opposite of the aspirational ideal of civilized American politics. In the way that Kleenex has become interchangeable with tissue, McCarthyism, for many, is an eponym for the unjust, reprehensible use of political power. Indicating that anything resembled the tactics and smears of the late senator from Wisconsin has been enough to suggest that such behavior was out of bounds, with no rightful place in our modern politics. But now comes a small, influential group of hard-line right-wingers who believe that, in the words of one popular meme in such circles, McCarthy was right.McCarthyite revivalism has flitted around the edges of American conservatism since the senator fell from grace during his conspiratorial anti-Communist campaign in the 1950s. In 1954, the conservative patron saint William F. Buckley Jr. and his friend and fellow conservative thinker L. Brent Bozell Jr. defended the senator in their book, McCarthy and His Enemies, as a sometimes-misguided figure unfairly maligned for his justified quest to root out Communist influence in government. Buckley called himself a “critic friendly to McCarthy” in 1959 and continued to defend the senator for decades.  The conservative media personality Ann Coulter, in her 2003 book, Treason, made the case that McCarthy had been right that the government was crawling with Communists, and that the greater problem was that Democrats “didn’t give a damn” about Soviet infiltration. Steve Bannon, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump and a MAGA-world podcaster, has been making the case for McCarthy’s rehabilitation since at least 2013 and remains fixated on the cause. When I recently raised the matter with him, he told me that “McCarthy is a hero to me” and explained that he had tried to buy the North Carolina home of McCarthy’s most famous target, General George C. Marshall. (Bannon said he ended up buying a home nearby.) More recently, the idea that “McCarthy was right” has been embraced by other influential voices around Trump—who learned some of his own hardball tactics from McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn—though not, apparently, by the president himself. Some of his only searchable public utterances about the senator have been negative: In separate posts on X in 2018 and 2019, he cited a “Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt” and “modern day McCarthyism” in decrying the special-counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.The case for McCarthy’s… [TheTopNews] Read More.

CERTAIN MOMENTS are worth paying attention to because they reveal something essential about a person. They act as windows into an individual’s psychological state, their ethics, the orders of their loves and their hates. Such occasions are crystallizing.That’s been true of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon briefings since the war against Iran began. We haven’t learned anything we didn’t already know about Hegseth in these briefings. But the press conferences have reminded the world why he is exactly the wrong person to hold the position he does.Wednesday’s briefing, for example, featured the usual Hegseth hubris, strutting, and cockiness. “I stand before you today with one unmistakable message about Operation Epic Fury: America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy,” he said. He declared that, four days into the mission, Iran is “toast, and they know it. Or at least soon enough they will know it.” He compared the Persian nation’s predicament to that of a football team: “They don’t know what plays to call, let alone how to get in the huddle and call those plays.” There was not even a hint of the challenges that might lie ahead in the conflict with Iran, a nation of 90 million people that borders seven countries—challenges that might include internal fragmentation and chaos, a dangerous insurgency, humanitarian crises, regional destabilization, and global economic disruption.[Tom Nichols: Pete Hegseth treats fallen American soldier as a PR problem]Now, it may be that none of this comes to pass. The joint American-Israeli air campaign has been stunningly effective. A peaceful, enlightened, democratic, pro-American regime may emerge. And even if Iran turns out to fall far short of that ideal, it could still be that the next regime is better than the previous, wicked one. So the world may be better off as a result of this war. Or it may not. It’s simply too early to tell. Wars that begin well don’t always end well, and they often produce unintended consequences.Hegseth displayed the prickliness and defensiveness we’ve come to expect, along with his resentment against “fake news.” Hegseth complained that the war-related deaths of six Americans were front-page news. The press, he claimed, “only wants to make the president look bad.” There were also the requisite shots at Democrats, who he said are “rooting against the country.”But what was most striking about Hegseth’s press conference was his emotional affect, his delight in celebrating mercilessness, his… [TheTopNews] Read More.