The Washington Post didn't just trim its newsroom. It carved out nearly half of it.
Updated figures now place the Post's layoffs between 350 and 375 journalists — not the roughly 300 that early reports suggested. That initial number was already staggering. The revised one is something else entirely.
Guild steward and Post Metro reporter Sarah Kaplan, as reported by the Washingtonian, provided the fuller accounting after days of piecing together the actual scope of the cuts:
"the paper is dropping between 350 and 375 journalists"
The reason earlier numbers fell short? Post employees were informed individually that their jobs had been eliminated, and the initial tally only captured union-covered staff. As the Washingtonian reported:
"Previous reports said that nearly 300 union members were among those laid off last week. That figure did not account for dozens more layoffs among Post journalists who aren't covered by the Guild's contract, including staffers in its foreign bureaus and editors and managers in Washington."
So the foreign bureau reporters and the editors and managers outside the Guild's umbrella were quietly disappearing from the ledger while the press ran with a number that already sounded catastrophic.
The Post's pre-layoff newsroom stood at 790 people. Losing 350 to 375 of them means somewhere between 44 percent and 47.5 percent of the entire newsroom is gone, according to Breitbart News.
Not a quarter. Not a third — which is where early reports pegged it. Nearly half.
People were already calling the initial round one of the biggest bloodbaths in media history when they thought it was around 300. The reality is measurably worse. And because employees were notified one by one rather than in a single announcement, it took Kaplan and the Guild several days just to assemble a coherent picture of the damage.
That piecemeal approach — whether intentional or not — had the convenient effect of keeping the full scale of the collapse out of the initial news cycle.
There's a temptation to treat this as a simple business story. Advertising revenue down, digital subscriptions plateauing, billionaire owner finally pulling the ripcord. And those factors are real.
But they don't explain why nearly half a newsroom vanished. Plenty of publications face financial headwinds without amputating half their editorial staff in a single stroke. What makes the Post's situation distinctive is that it spent years burning through the one asset that was supposed to justify its existence: credibility.
The Post branded itself as the indispensable check on power — "Democracy Dies in Darkness" stamped right there on the masthead. But the paper increasingly operated less as a news organization and more as an advocacy shop with a printing press. Readers noticed. Subscribers made choices. And now 350-plus journalists are paying the price for an editorial culture that confused activism with journalism.
That's the part the industry postmortems will skip. They'll talk about the "challenging media landscape" and "digital transformation." They won't talk about what happens when a legacy institution decides its job is to tell readers what to think rather than what happened.
The Post isn't dying in isolation. Legacy media outlets across the board are hemorrhaging staff, influence, and audience. The common thread isn't technology or generational shifts in media consumption — those are accelerants, not causes. The common thread is that institutional media decided to cater to a narrow ideological audience and then discovered that audience wasn't large enough to sustain the operation.
Conservative audiences left first. Then moderates. Then, even some liberals who simply wanted straight reporting grew tired of being lectured. What remains is a shrinking base that already agrees with every editorial premise baked into every "news" story — and that base doesn't generate enough revenue to keep 790 journalists employed.
So now it's 415. Maybe fewer, once the next round hits.
The Post will likely attempt to rebrand whatever emerges from this gutting as a leaner, more focused operation. Expect language about "prioritizing digital" and "investing in core strengths." That's what every media company says when it's contracting.
But a newsroom cut by nearly half isn't pivoting. It's surviving. And the journalists who remain will work under the shadow of knowing that their institution's choices — editorial and financial — led directly to the elimination of their colleagues' livelihoods.
Seven hundred and ninety people walked into that newsroom. Fewer than half still have a desk.
Democracy doesn't die in darkness. Newspapers die in self-delusion.
A Washington Free Beacon investigation is raising pointed questions about one of Maryland Governor Wes Moore's most frequently told personal stories — that his great-grandfather, a minister in South Carolina, was forced to flee to Jamaica under threat from the Ku Klux Klan.
The report claims that historical records from the Protestant Episcopal Church and contemporary newspaper accounts tell a different story: that James Thomas's departure was an orderly and public professional transfer after he was appointed to replace a deceased pastor in Jamaica, not a secret, middle-of-the-night escape.
For Moore, the timing couldn't be worse. The Democrat is widely believed to have White House ambitions, and the scrutiny strikes at the heart of a narrative he has built into his political identity.
Moore has placed the KKK narrative at the center of his personal brand, according to Fox News. In a 2020 appearance on the Yang Speaks podcast — an episode literally titled "Wes Moore on how the KKK ran his family into exile" — he detailed how his great-grandfather was a minister in Winnsboro, South Carolina, who fled to Jamaica after being threatened by the Klan.
By 2023, the story had become a rhetorical cornerstone. Moore told Time magazine:
"I am literally the grandson of someone who was run out of this country by the Ku Klux Klan, right? So the fact that I can be both this grandson of someone who was run outta this country by the Ku Klux Klan, and also be the first Black governor in the history of the state of Maryland."
That framing does a lot of work. It transforms a policy politician into a symbol — the descendant of racial terror who ascended to the governor's mansion. It's the kind of story that launches presidential campaigns.
And it may not hold up.
The Free Beacon report points to church records and newspaper accounts suggesting Thomas's move to Jamaica was a routine pastoral transfer, not a desperate flight from white supremacist violence. The distinction matters. The difference between "appointed to replace a deceased pastor" and "run out of this country" is not a matter of emphasis or oral tradition softening the edges. Those are two fundamentally different stories.
There's also a location discrepancy that the article doesn't resolve. Moore has described his great-grandfather as a minister in Winnsboro, South Carolina. The Free Beacon report references Pineville, S.C. These are not the same place.
This isn't the first time the Free Beacon has turned its attention to Moore's biography. The outlet has previously raised questions about his military record and an Oxford University thesis. A pattern of biographical scrutiny is forming around a man who has built his political career substantially on the power of his personal story.
Moore's office did not directly rebut the historical records. Spokesperson Ammar Moussa offered this to Fox News Digital:
"We're not going to litigate a family's century-old oral history with a partisan outlet. The broader reality is not in dispute: intimidation and racial terror were pervasive in the Jim Crow South, and it rarely came with neat documentation. Even Bishop William Alexander Guerry — whom they cite to suggest there was no hostility — was later murdered amid intense backlash tied to his racial equality work. The Governor is focused on doing the job Marylanders elected him to do."
Read that carefully. The statement doesn't say the Free Beacon got it wrong. It says Moore's team won't "litigate" the question. It pivots to the general truth that the Jim Crow South was a place of racial terror — which no one disputes — and uses that broader reality as a shield against specific factual questions about a specific family story.
That's not a rebuttal. That's a rhetorical exit ramp.
The reference to Bishop Guerry is doing similar work — introducing a tangential historical figure to create an atmosphere of racial violence, thereby making it seem unreasonable to question whether this particular minister was actually threatened. The logic amounts to: bad things happened in the South, therefore, this specific claim shouldn't be scrutinized. That's not how biography works, and it's certainly not how journalism works.
The comparisons arrived almost immediately. Greg Price, who served as Trump's White House rapid response manager for the first half of 2025, posted on X:
"Wes Moore is being talked about as one of the top contenders in the 2028 Democratic primary and the guy has already told more lies about his life than Elizabeth Warren."
National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru kept it shorter and sharper:
"Moore is reaching Biden levels of fabulism."
Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume simply pointed readers to the reporting:
"Hoo boy. Read this, and the post it is in response to."
The Elizabeth Warren comparison is apt because it identifies a specific species of political dishonesty: the biographical embellishment designed to claim membership in an oppressed group — or proximity to oppression — for political advantage. It's not garden-variety political spin. It's identity construction.
Moore said in September that he is "not running for president" in 2028 and is "excited" about serving a full term if he wins re-election in November. Nobody in professional politics takes that at face value. The DNC convention stage in August 2024, the national media profile, the carefully curated biography — these are not the moves of a man content to govern Annapolis.
Which is precisely why this story has teeth. Presidential campaigns are built on biography, and biography can be audited. The further Moore moves toward a national stage, the more every claim gets tested against the documentary record. The Free Beacon found church records and newspaper clippings. Opposition researchers in a presidential primary will find more.
The Democratic Party has a recurring problem with candidates whose personal mythologies outrun their documented histories. The instinct to build political identity around victimhood and overcoming — rather than around policy accomplishment and vision — creates an incentive structure where embellishment isn't just tempting, it's almost structurally required. If your political value depends on how compelling your suffering narrative is, the pressure to sharpen that narrative is immense.
Moore's response to the scrutiny will tell us more than the initial report did. A politician confident in his story produces the evidence. A politician who pivots to "we won't litigate oral history" is buying time.
The records are either there or they aren't. Oral history is powerful and real — but when you use it on a national stage to build a political brand, it stops being a family story and starts being a public claim. Public claims get checked.
Moore wanted the KKK narrative to carry him to a higher office. Now it's carrying questions he hasn't answered.
The general counsels of America's three largest cell phone carriers sat before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Tuesday morning and defended their companies' decisions to hand over lawmakers' phone data to former special counsel Jack Smith — data obtained through subpoenas issued under non-disclosure orders that kept the targeted members of Congress entirely in the dark.
At least 84 subpoenas hit AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon as part of Smith's investigation. Ten of those subpoenas targeted the records of 20 current or former lawmakers. The companies complied. The lawmakers never knew.
That silence is the heart of the scandal.
According to Politico, each executive offered a variation on the same theme: we followed the law. T-Mobile general counsel Mark Nelson told the subcommittee that when T-Mobile receives valid demands from government entities, it responds "as required by law and with customer privacy top of mind." Verizon Consumer general counsel Chris Miller acknowledged the situation was imperfect but insisted his company operated within the legal framework. AT&T general counsel David McAtee offered a slightly different picture — his company actually pushed back.
McAtee testified that AT&T raised the Speech or Debate Clause with Smith's office when asked to produce lawmakers' phone data. The clause, a constitutional protection designed to shield legislators from executive branch intimidation, should have given any prosecutor pause. Smith's team apparently felt otherwise.
"The Special Counsel's office never responded to that email, at least not substantively. And ultimately, the office abandoned the subpoena, and no records were produced."
So when AT&T flagged a constitutional concern, Smith's office went quiet — and eventually walked away. That raises an obvious question: if the subpoena couldn't survive a polite email about constitutional protections, how solid was the legal basis in the first place?
T-Mobile and Verizon, by contrast, did not mount similar challenges. They turned over the records. Verizon, which controlled many accounts for lawmakers' personal and official phones, bore the brunt of senatorial anger.
Sen. Lindsey Graham's phone records were seized as part of Smith's probe. Graham directed his frustration squarely at Verizon's Miller:
"I don't think I deserve what happened to me."
"You failed me. You failed to honor the contract protecting us all."
Graham was among the most vocal in arguing that he and other affected lawmakers should be compensated. Sens. Josh Hawley and John Kennedy also gave Miller an earful during the hearing. The anger wasn't performative — these are sitting U.S. senators whose private communications were swept up by a political prosecution, and the companies they pay for phone service helped make it happen without so much as a courtesy call.
Miller, to his credit, conceded what others wouldn't:
"These were unprecedented circumstances, and while we fully complied with the law, we also acknowledge that we could have done better in terms of our process. One year ago, we began working with the Senate Sergeant at Arms on changes to the handling of legal demands for official Senate lines. And we have expanded those changes to include personal and campaign lines."
"Could have done better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Verizon handed a politically motivated special counsel the call records of elected officials, shielded by non-disclosure orders that prevented those officials from knowing, challenging, or contesting the surveillance. A year later, they started talking to the Sergeant at Arms about maybe improving the process.
The carriers are the middlemen. The real question is what Jack Smith's office was doing issuing 84 subpoenas — ten of them targeting lawmakers — while operating under non-disclosure orders that ensured no one on Capitol Hill could raise a constitutional objection in real time.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley framed it plainly in his opening statement:
"Smith and his team irresponsibly steamrolled ahead while intentionally hiding their activities from Members of Congress."
Grassley has pledged to call Smith to testify before his committee in the coming months. Smith recently appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, where he maintained that politics played no role in his work and said he would have made the same prosecutorial decisions regardless of whether the former president was Republican or Democratic.
That claim grows harder to sustain with each new revelation. Dozens of felony charges were levied against a political opponent. Subpoenas vacuuming up the phone records of Republican lawmakers. Non-disclosure orders ensured none of the targets could fight back. And when one carrier — AT&T — raised a basic constitutional question, the special counsel's office abandoned the subpoena rather than answer it. That's not the behavior of a prosecution confident in its legal footing. That's the behavior of a prosecution hoping no one would ask.
Ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin offered the Democratic response, which amounted to: why are we even talking about this?
"This is frankly an embarrassing use of the committee's limited time, and I urge my colleagues to turn their attention to the threats that President Trump currently poses to our democracy."
A special counsel secretly obtained the phone records of sitting members of Congress, and the Democratic position is that investigating it wastes time. Durbin did say Smith should testify "as soon as possible," — but the framing tells you everything. For Democrats, the surveillance of Republican lawmakers isn't a civil liberties concern. It's an inconvenience that distracts from their preferred narrative.
Imagine, for one moment, the reaction if a Trump-era special counsel had secretly subpoenaed the phone records of 20 Democratic lawmakers. The words "constitutional crisis" would have trended for a week. Every editorial board in America would have discovered a sudden passion for the Speech or Debate Clause. The asymmetry isn't subtle.
Grassley's pledge to haul Smith before the Senate Judiciary Committee sets up the next act. Smith's House testimony offered his version of events — no political motivation, just following the facts. But the facts now include a special counsel who issued subpoenas he abandoned the moment a carrier questioned their constitutionality, who operated behind non-disclosure orders that neutralized congressional oversight, and who targeted the communications of the very legislators responsible for checking executive power.
The carriers will update their processes. Verizon already has. But process reforms don't answer the foundational question: What happens when a weaponized prosecution uses lawful mechanisms to achieve unlawful ends? The subpoenas were technically valid. The non-disclosure orders were technically legal. And yet the result was that a special counsel investigating the president's political allies secretly obtained the phone records of his political allies in Congress — and nobody could object because nobody knew.
The system worked exactly as Smith designed it to. That's the problem.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — not exactly known as friendly territory for conservative policy — handed the Trump administration a significant legal victory this week, granting a stay of a lower court order that had blocked the end of Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal.
The ruling clears the path for the administration to proceed with terminating TPS for approximately 60,000 migrants who hold no other immigration status in the United States. The case, National TPS Alliance v. Noem, had been one of several legal battles waged to keep the decades-old designations alive indefinitely.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem didn't mince words:
"A win for the rule of law and vindication for the US Constitution. Under the previous administration, Temporary Protected Status was abused to allow violent terrorists, criminals, and national security threats into our nation."
The word "temporary" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Temporary Protected Status. Honduras and Nicaragua were first designated for TPS in 1999, following a hurricane. Nepal received its designation in 2015 after an earthquake. That means Honduran and Nicaraguan TPS holders have been living under "temporary" protection for over a quarter century.
A hurricane hit. Clinton granted temporary relief. Then Bush extended it. Then Obama extended it. Then Trump tried to end it. Then Biden not only extended it but expanded the entire program to the highest levels in its history, ensuring over a million migrants became eligible. Nearly every president since Clinton has routinely extended TPS and designated new countries — turning an emergency measure into a conveyor belt for indefinite residency.
As Breitbart News reported, Noem framed it plainly:
"TPS was never designed to be permanent, yet previous administrations have used it as a de facto amnesty program for decades. Given the improved situation in each of these countries, we are wisely concluding what was intended to be a temporary designation."
She's right on the structural point, whatever one thinks of the individual cases. Congress designed TPS as a short-term shield — a way to pause deportations when a country was in acute crisis. It was never meant to create a parallel immigration system where "temporary" meant "until someone has the political will to say no."
The scale of what the Biden administration did with TPS deserves its own reckoning. Over a million migrants became eligible under Biden's watch — a staggering expansion of a program that was already being stretched well past its statutory intent. That wasn't emergency management. That was immigration policy conducted through the back door, bypassing the legislative process entirely.
This is the pattern that conservatives have identified for years: a program is created with narrow, sympathetic parameters. It gets extended once, twice, a dozen times. Each extension creates a larger constituency that makes termination politically harder. Eventually, the "temporary" designation calcifies into something indistinguishable from permanent residency — and anyone who suggests winding it down gets accused of cruelty.
It's a ratchet that only turns one direction. Until now.
The fact that this stay came from the Ninth Circuit matters. This is the appellate court that immigration activists have long treated as a reliable backstop against enforcement. For years, the circuit served as the preferred venue for challenges to border security measures, deportation orders, and asylum restrictions.
The Ninth Circuit concluded the administration's position was strong enough to warrant staying the lower court's injunction, which signals something important about the legal merits. Courts grant stays when they believe the party seeking one is likely to succeed and that irreparable harm would result from leaving the lower court's order in place. The Trump administration cleared that bar in the Ninth Circuit.
That alone tells you where the legal winds are blowing on TPS termination.
The approximately 60,000 migrants affected by this ruling now face the reality that "temporary" may finally mean temporary. The legal battle in National TPS Alliance v. Noem isn't over — stays are procedural steps, not final rulings — but the trajectory is clear. The administration has momentum, the appellate court's action suggests the legal foundation is sound, and DHS is moving forward.
The broader question is whether this becomes a template. TPS designations remain in effect for numerous other countries, many with their own long histories of routine extension. If the administration succeeds in unwinding the Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal designations, the precedent will be difficult to contain.
For twenty-six years, Washington treated "temporary" as a word with no expiration date. The Ninth Circuit just put one back on the calendar.
Molly Wasow Park, the commissioner of New York City's Department of Social Services, resigned this week after learning she would not be retained by Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration. The departure — barely a month into Mamdani's tenure — signals that the new mayor's team has wasted little time finding fault with the agency tasked with managing the city's sprawling homelessness and social welfare apparatus.
Park acknowledged her exit on Monday, telling reporters the role she had hoped to keep simply wasn't going to materialize. Two people familiar with the circumstances confirmed she was told she would not be retained. A third anonymous source corroborated the account.
The timing is notable. Eighteen New Yorkers have died after exposure to the elements during a recent stretch of extreme cold, with the first death occurring on January 24. Park is still scheduled to testify before the City Council about those deaths — even as she packs her desk.
Mamdani and his senior aides had already begun reconsidering the direction and leadership of the Department of Social Services before the cold-weather deaths made headlines, the New York Times reported. First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan reportedly shared concerns about Park's stewardship, with the mayor's team concluding the agency was not adequately addressing the needs of what they described as an "economically unstable population."
That phrase does a lot of heavy lifting without saying much. New York City's homelessness problem is not new, not mysterious, and not the result of insufficient bureaucratic compassion. The city has spent billions on shelter systems, transitional housing, and social programs. The question isn't whether officials care enough. It's whether the machinery they've built actually works.
Park herself seemed to acknowledge the limits of what her agency accomplished. In an interview, she offered this:
"When the final evaluation happens, I'm sure there's going to be instances where we find instances where we could have done something different. I feel like in an awful lot of cases, we did what we needed to."
That's the kind of self-assessment that sounds reasonable in a conference room and hollow on a sidewalk where someone froze to death.
Park was appointed by former Mayor Eric Adams in 2023, replacing Gary Jenkins, who resigned that same year over his handling of the city's homelessness situation. She inherited a department already buckling — at the time, the city was scrambling to shelter thousands of migrants arriving every week while still dealing with the economic and social wreckage of pandemic-era policies.
Now she's gone too, and the pattern is unmistakable. New York cycles through social services commissioners the way other cities cycle through school superintendents: a new face, a new set of promises, the same intractable problems, and an eventual resignation that gets framed as a mutual decision.
Mayor Mamdani's spokeswoman, Dora Pekec, issued the requisite diplomatic statement:
"We appreciate Commissioner Park's years of service to the city and the mayor looks forward to working with her through this transitional period."
City Hall added it would name a replacement "in the coming weeks."
Since the cold snap began, the city says it made more than 1,400 placements into shelters or other indoor sites and involuntarily removed 34 people from the streets. Those numbers tell two stories at once.
On one hand, 1,400 placements suggest the system was working at scale to get people indoors. On the other hand, 18 people still died. And the involuntary removal of just 34 people — out of a homeless population that numbers in the tens of thousands — raises an obvious question about whether the city's legal and political framework even allows officials to act decisively when lives are at stake.
Park, for her part, suggested the city should spend more time understanding why homeless individuals refuse shelter in the first place:
"We need to spend more time as a society asking what got people to this sense of trauma and dislocation, that they would rather stay on the street."
It's a sentiment that sounds compassionate. It's also the kind of open-ended inquiry that can justify inaction indefinitely. At some point, the question stops being "why won't they come inside?" and starts being "why won't the city bring them inside?" New York's progressive establishment has spent years insisting that individual autonomy — even the autonomy to freeze — trumps intervention. The 18 dead are the cost of that philosophy.
The deeper story here isn't one commissioner's departure. It's what Mamdani intends to do differently — and whether his instincts will run toward more of the same.
Park had pushed to use rental vouchers to help finance affordable housing developments, a policy direction that sounds innovative until you consider that New York has layered voucher program upon voucher program for decades without solving the underlying housing crisis. The city doesn't have a voucher shortage. It has a housing supply problem driven by zoning restrictions, regulatory burdens, and construction costs that make affordable development nearly impossible without massive public subsidy.
If Mamdani's team forced Park out because they want a commissioner who will pursue even more aggressive progressive interventions — more spending, more programs, more studies about "trauma and dislocation" — then the revolving door will keep spinning. The next commissioner will inherit the same broken system, face the same structural constraints, and eventually sit for the same exit interview.
Councilwoman Crystal Hudson, who chairs the Council's general welfare committee, praised Park as a partner in the work of getting people off the streets:
"[A] steadfast partner in the hard work of getting people off the streets and into permanent homes."
Steadfast, perhaps. But 18 people are dead, a commissioner is out, and the agency is leaderless heading into what remains of winter.
Park insisted the cold-snap deaths played no role in her decision to leave, and that she felt no pressure from City Hall. The anonymous sources tell a different story — that she was effectively told her time was up. Both versions may contain partial truth, but only one matters: the person responsible for the city's social services safety net during the deadliest cold stretch in recent memory is walking away, and no one in city government is willing to say plainly why.
That's the real failure. Not one commissioner's tenure, but a political culture where accountability gets laundered through anonymous sources and polite statements about "transitional periods." Eighteen New Yorkers froze. Someone should have to own that sentence out loud.
Instead, New York gets what it always gets — a new name on the door and the quiet expectation that next winter will somehow be different.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito sat for a 90-minute interview with journalist James Rosen — published in Politico — and offered a rare window into how he views his late colleague Antonin Scalia's unfinished work on the bench. The headline moment: Alito's quiet admission that Scalia, who died unexpectedly in his sleep in early 2016 at age 79, would barely recognize the country he left behind.
"He would have been appalled at so much."
Alito did not elaborate. He didn't need to.
The 75-year-old justice, who authored the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, went further in describing what Scalia's absence has meant — not just for the Court, but for the conservative legal project Scalia spent decades building.
"Even since Nino died, things are so different. I so often wish he were still here. He started so much and it would have been good to have him around to see it to completion."
That word — "completion" — carries weight. Alito isn't eulogizing. He's mapping unfinished terrain.
Scalia's death in early 2016 opened one of the most consequential political battles in modern Supreme Court history. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held the seat vacant for more than a year, blocking President Barack Obama from filling it. Donald Trump, who became the presumptive Republican nominee just months after Scalia's passing and won the general election that November, appointed Neil Gorsuch as Scalia's successor.
That single appointment preserved the ideological trajectory Scalia had charted. What followed — including Brett Kavanaugh's bruising 2018 confirmation hearings, during which Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexual assault, an accusation he denied — cemented a 6-3 conservative majority that has reshaped American law at a pace not seen in generations.
McConnell's gamble was, in hindsight, the most consequential act of Senate leadership in a generation. The seat didn't just stay conservative. As The Daily Beast reported, it became the fulcrum for everything that came after — Dobbs, religious liberty cases, and the broader restoration of originalist jurisprudence that Scalia pioneered from his appointment in 1986 until his death three decades later.
Alito's use of "Nino" — Scalia's nickname among friends and family — signals something the interview's clinical details don't fully capture. These weren't just colleagues who shared a judicial philosophy. Alito is speaking as someone who watched a friend build a framework and then inherited the responsibility of carrying it forward.
Rosen noted that one of Scalia's children expressed a similar sentiment — that the timing of Scalia's death spared him from witnessing much that would have upset him. Alito apparently agreed.
It's a striking thought. The justice who revolutionized conservative legal reasoning, who wrote dissents so sharp they read like blueprints for future majorities, died just before the political world cracked open in ways no one anticipated. He never saw Trump's presidency. He never saw his own dissents become the foundation for Alito's majority opinion in Dobbs. He never saw the Court achieve what he'd spent his career arguing it should.
And he never saw the cultural backlash that followed.
The conservative legal movement is in its strongest institutional position in modern memory. A 6-3 majority. Alito and his conservative colleagues have greenlit the vast majority of Trump's policies. The originalist framework Scalia championed is no longer a dissenting theory — it's the operating system.
But none of that has come without friction. The 2022 leak of Alito's draft Dobbs opinion to Politico was an institutional earthquake — the first time a full draft Supreme Court opinion had been disclosed before its official release. Notably, Rosen's 90-minute interview with Alito apparently either didn't address the leak or Rosen chose not to include it. That silence is its own kind of editorial decision.
Subsequent leaks revealed internal disagreements among justices over ethics rules and exposed a confidential memo in which Chief Justice John Roberts pushed to grant Trump broad immunity from prosecution. The Court's internal deliberations, once treated as sacrosanct, have become another front in the political war surrounding the institution.
Scalia operated in a different era — one where the Court's battles were fierce but largely contained within its marble walls. The justices argued in opinions, not through anonymous sources. The institution's legitimacy was assumed, not polled.
Alito's refusal to specify what Scalia would have found appalling is the most interesting part of the remark. The vagueness is doing real work. It lets the statement travel in every direction — toward the coarsening of political discourse, toward institutional decay, toward a culture that has lurched in directions Scalia spent his career resisting.
Rosen framed the broader context by writing that Scalia would have been less enthusiastic about American politics, which have grown "coarser and more polarized than ever before." That tracks with what most honest observers would acknowledge, regardless of ideology. But it also understates what's actually changed.
Scalia believed the Constitution meant what it said when it was ratified — and that judges who invented new meanings were the real threat to democratic self-governance. That argument hasn't gotten easier to make. It's gotten easier to prove. Every institutional norm that's crumbled since 2016, every leak, every political circus dressed up as a confirmation hearing, every attempt to delegitimize the Court because it reached conclusions the left doesn't like — all of it vindicates the originalist warning that when courts become political actors, politics will come for the courts.
Scalia saw that coming before most conservatives had the vocabulary for it.
Alito's reflection isn't nostalgia. It's an inventory. He described Scalia as someone who "started so much" — meaning the project is ongoing, the scaffolding is up, and the workers are still on site. Alito, at 75, is one of those workers. The question is whether the Court can finish what Scalia started while the institution itself faces pressures he never had to navigate — pressures that come not from legal opponents but from a political culture that has decided the judiciary is just another arena for power struggles.
Scalia would have had something to say about that. Something sharp, something quotable, something that cut through the noise with the precision of a man who believed words had fixed meanings and institutions had fixed purposes.
Instead, it falls to Alito to say it plainly: things are so different now. And the man who mapped the path forward isn't here to walk it.
Hillary and Bill Clinton are now objecting to the videotaping of their private depositions before the House Oversight Committee — depositions they already agreed to sit for. The dispute threatens to derail scheduled appearances on Feb. 26 and Feb. 27 in connection with the committee's probe into Jeffrey Epstein.
The agreement for those depositions halted the House from moving forward with a floor vote to hold the Clintons in criminal contempt of Congress. That deal, reached after a months-long back-and-forth between Clinton lawyers and the committee, appeared to settle the matter. Now the Clintons want to rewrite the terms.
Bill Clinton, the 42nd president, posted a statement Friday framing the entire process as a partisan setup:
"Chairman Comer says he wants cameras, but only behind closed doors. It serves only partisan interests. This is not fact-finding, it's pure politics."
He followed that with a sharper line:
"I will not sit idly as they use me as a prop in a closed-door kangaroo court."
The rhetoric is unmistakable. A former president who agreed to appear under oath is now publicly campaigning against the conditions of that appearance — conditions his own legal team negotiated.
Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, the Kentucky Republican, responded over the weekend with considerably less theatrics and considerably more documentation, Punchbowl News reported. His committee released correspondence with the Clintons' legal team showing that video guidelines were discussed throughout the negotiation process. Recording depositions, Comer noted, is common practice for House proceedings.
"The Clintons are now pushing a false narrative to play victim."
Comer also made clear that the Clintons' preferred alternative — public hearings — isn't off the table. It's just not a substitute for the depositions they already committed to:
"The Clintons can have their hearing after completing the depositions they agreed to."
That distinction matters. A deposition is a fact-finding tool — questions under oath, follow-ups, and detailed examination. A public hearing is a performance stage. The Clintons aren't asking for more transparency. They're asking for a format where cameras serve their interests, where opening statements and five-minute rounds replace sustained questioning.
Anyone who's watched a congressional hearing knows the difference. Depositions produce answers. Hearings produce clips.
While the Clintons wage a media campaign against sitting for questions, Ghislaine Maxwell was scheduled to be deposed virtually by the Oversight Committee today. According to Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, Maxwell's lawyers have indicated she intends to invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
That backdrop makes the Clinton maneuvering all the more striking. Maxwell, according to a New York Times report published Sunday, was integral in setting up the Clinton Global Initiative, including helping set up funding for it. The committee is probing the Clintons' relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell — Epstein's most notorious associate — helped build the infrastructure of one of the Clintons' signature philanthropic ventures.
And she's pleading the Fifth.
The Clintons, for their part, aren't invoking any constitutional right. They're not claiming privilege. They're complaining about cameras — in depositions they agreed to, under terms their lawyers helped shape, to avoid being held in criminal contempt of Congress.
The Clinton playbook here is vintage. Agree to cooperate when the legal pressure peaks. Then, once the contempt threat recedes, contest the terms. Shift the argument from substance to process. Call it partisan. Call it a kangaroo court. Make the investigation the story instead of what the investigation might uncover.
It worked for decades in Washington. The question is whether it works now, with a committee that holds the contempt card and has already shown willingness to play it.
Consider the sequence: the Clintons' lawyers negotiated for months. They reached a deal. The deal prevented a criminal contempt vote. Video was discussed throughout those negotiations, per the committee's own correspondence. And now — with the deposition days away — Bill Clinton takes to social media to recast the entire arrangement as an ambush.
If the videotaping terms were unacceptable, the time to reject them was during the months of negotiation, not two weeks before the deposition date. The timing suggests this isn't a procedural objection. It's a pressure campaign designed to either extract new concessions or manufacture a pretext for non-compliance.
The Feb. 26 and Feb. 27 dates remain on the calendar. If the Clintons refuse to appear under the agreed-upon terms, the contempt question resurfaces — this time with even less sympathy for the subjects, who struck a deal and then tried to wriggle out of it.
Meanwhile, Maxwell invokes the Fifth from behind a screen, and a New York Times report draws a line between her and the financial scaffolding of the Clinton Global Initiative. The committee's probe is pulling threads that the Clintons clearly prefer stay untugged.
Bill Clinton says he won't be a "prop." But a man who voluntarily agreed to testify under oath, then launched a public campaign to avoid the format he negotiated, isn't fighting for principle. He's fighting for control of the frame.
The cameras, it turns out, are only a problem when you can't pick the angle.
The 9th U.S. Court of Appeals handed the Trump administration a major legal victory Monday, striking down a lower court ruling that had blocked plans to revoke deportation protections for citizens of Nicaragua, Nepal, and Honduras. The three-judge panel found the government will likely prevail on the merits — clearing the path to end Temporary Protected Status designations that were never meant to last forever but somehow did.
The decision reverses an August ruling from a California judge who had blocked the administration's plans, citing "sufficient racial animus." The appeals panel dismantled that reasoning in a single, clinical sentence:
"We conclude that the government is likely to succeed on the merits of its appeal either by showing that the district court lacked jurisdiction or by prevailing on plaintiffs' arbitrary-and-capricious APA challenge."
Translation: the lower court either shouldn't have taken the case at all, or got the law wrong when it did.
Temporary Protected Status does exactly what the name says — or at least, it's supposed to. The program grants foreign nationals a reprieve from deportation when conditions in their home countries make return dangerous. War, natural disaster, civil unrest. The keyword is right there in the title.
Yet for tens of thousands of people from Honduras, Nepal, and Nicaragua, "temporary" stretched into years, then decades. Approximately 50,000 Hondurans, 7,000 Nepalis, and 3,000 Nicaraguans — roughly 60,000 people total — have lived under rolling TPS extensions that transformed emergency relief into something functionally permanent.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem framed the ruling as long overdue, The Hill reported. She called the decision a:
"Win for the rule of law and vindication for the US Constitution."
Noem didn't stop there. She aimed the program's drift from its original purpose:
"Under the previous administration, Temporary Protected Status was abused to allow violent terrorists, criminals, and national security threats into our nation."
She described what TPS had become in practice — a:
"De facto amnesty program."
That phrase lands because the math supports it. When a "temporary" designation persists for a generation, the word has lost all meaning. The program stops being an emergency shelter and starts being a side door around the immigration system that millions of others try to navigate lawfully.
The California judge's original reasoning deserves scrutiny. The court blocked the administration's decision to end TPS by finding "sufficient racial animus" behind the policy — a claim that treats enforcement of immigration law as inherently suspect when it affects non-white populations.
This is a legal strategy the left has refined into muscle memory. Any restriction, any enforcement action, any attempt to apply the plain text of immigration law gets filtered through a racial lens until the policy question disappears entirely. The debate stops being about whether conditions in Honduras have improved enough to end temporary protections. It becomes about whether the people making that determination harbor secret bigotry.
The 9th Circuit — not historically a friendly venue for conservative policy — wasn't buying it. The panel's ruling suggests the lower court either overstepped its jurisdiction or failed to demonstrate that the administration's decision was arbitrary under the Administrative Procedure Act. Neither path vindicates the racial animus theory.
Noem grounded the decision in the simplest possible terms:
"Given the improved situation in each of these countries, we are wisely concluding what was intended to be a temporary designation."
This is the argument opponents of TPS termination never want to engage with directly. If conditions improve — and at some point over the course of decades, they inevitably do to some degree — then the legal basis for the designation evaporates. Continuing protections after the triggering conditions have subsided isn't compassion. It's policy inertia dressed up as humanitarianism.
The left's position requires you to believe that "temporary" means "until we decide to make it permanent through sheer repetition." That every TPS extension is justified by the same emergency that prompted the original designation, no matter how many years pass. Ending the program is cruel, but the program never ending is just fine.
Sixty thousand people built lives under a designation that told them, from the very first day, that it would end. That's a real human cost, and it's worth acknowledging. But the blame for that cost falls on the administrations that kept extending a fiction rather than creating a real pathway — or an honest timeline for departure. Kicking the can for decades and then calling the person who finally stops kicking a bigot is not governance. It's cowardice on an installment plan.
The 9th Circuit siding with the administration on immigration enforcement marks a meaningful moment. This is the court that became synonymous with blocking Trump-era immigration policy during his first term. That a three-judge panel from this circuit found the government likely to prevail — and on merits, not a technicality — signals that the legal ground beneath TPS challenges is shifting.
The ruling doesn't finalize anything. It allows the administration to move forward while litigation continues. But the trajectory is clear. Courts are increasingly unwilling to treat immigration enforcement decisions as presumptively unconstitutional, and the "racial animus" framework that powered so many injunctions is running into its limits.
For 60,000 people, what comes next is uncertain. For the rule of law, Monday brought clarity. Temporary means temporary — and a court finally said so.
The Trump administration locked in a consent decree last week that does what congressional gridlock never could: it declares one of President Biden's mass migrant "parole" programs unlawful and binds the federal government for the next 15 years from resurrecting it. The settlement was signed off by Judge T. Kent Wetherell in a federal court in northern Florida.
The decree emerged from a lawsuit Florida filed in 2023, and the language leaves little room for creative reinterpretation. The federal government agreed not to use the Secretary of Homeland Security's parole authority under Section 1182(d)(5) to create any categorical processing pathway for aliens at the border designed to alleviate detention capacity concerns or improve DHS operational efficiency. That includes any policy that would shift removal proceedings from the border to the interior or postpone them altogether.
In plain English: the pipeline Biden built to wave millions through the border is sealed shut — and the next president who tries to reopen it will have a federal court order standing in the way.
As The Washington Times noted, parole was never designed to be a mass-entry program. It exists as a narrow tool allowing the Secretary of Homeland Security to admit individuals on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. The Biden administration turned that scalpel into a firehose.
Under Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, categorical parole programs welcomed tens of thousands of Afghans, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, and millions more from other countries. Former immigration judge Andrew "Art" Arthur calculated that nearly 3 million migrants were paroled into the United States during the Biden era — a figure he says accounts for a large portion, if not an outright majority, of the illegal immigrants who successfully settled in the country.
The mechanics weren't subtle. Biden didn't want to maintain the stiff controls President Trump left in place. Rather than work through Congress to change immigration law, the administration turned to parole to alleviate pressure at the border — pressure that its own policy reversals had created.
A 2022 deposition proved how deliberate this was. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody's office deposed Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, who admitted that Biden policy changes had made it tougher to detain and remove illegal immigrants caught at the border. Arthur put it bluntly:
"When Moody deposed Raul Ortiz, the entire Biden administration catch-and-release scheme, which up to that point had been operating under the wire, was exposed."
That deposition became the foundation for Florida's 2023 lawsuit — and ultimately, this consent decree.
The consent decree doesn't merely reverse a Biden-era memo. It constrains executive discretion for 15 years, a timeline that stretches across at least three presidential terms. Arthur framed the stakes clearly:
"This consent decree will prevent a future administration from abusing DHS's limited parole authority in the way that the Biden administration did."
Under the decree's terms, Arthur estimated parole numbers would drop to maybe a couple of hundred per year, which is far closer to what the statute actually contemplated. Case-by-case, not categorical. Individual, not industrial.
Jae Williams, press secretary for Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who finalized the decree as Moody's successor, connected the legal victory to the broader enforcement picture:
"We thank the Trump administration for working with our office to obtain this result, which ensures that the next Democratic administration cannot abuse the parole system to allow another invasion of illegal aliens into our country."
The Trump administration had already moved to suspend the Biden parole programs upon taking office and is now working to remove those who entered through the legally questionable pathways. The consent decree ensures that the suspension isn't just a policy preference of one administration — it's a judicially enforceable commitment.
Critics will note the tactic at work here: "sue and settle," where a plaintiff files suit against a sympathetic administration and both sides agree to a binding resolution that bypasses Congress and the standard rulemaking process. Left-leaning activists have been the most prolific users of this approach for decades, leveraging friendly administrations to lock in environmental regulations, housing mandates, and immigration expansions that would never survive a floor vote.
Now it cuts the other direction, and the discomfort is already audible. Jennifer Coberly, a lawyer with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, objected to the decree's reach:
"The biggest thing about this is it's directly contrary to law. Generally, [the law] does provide discretion to the administration, and this is saying you can't do that for 15 years."
The irony is rich. For years, the immigration bar cheered as the Biden administration stretched "discretion" past its statutory breaking point to parole nearly 3 million people into the country. Now that a court has drawn the line, discretion is suddenly sacred. The argument isn't really about legal principle — it's about who gets to exercise the power.
Coberly did note that some Biden parole programs might fall outside the decree's scope, pointing to the pathway that allowed Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans to skip the southern border and fly directly into American airports without visas. That interpretation hasn't been confirmed by either party to the settlement, and it remains to be tested. But even if that narrow carve-out survives scrutiny, the core architecture of Biden's border parole regime is gone.
Executive orders are temporary. Regulations can be rewritten. But a consent decree is a court order, enforceable through contempt proceedings. A future administration that wanted to revive categorical parole at the border wouldn't just need to issue a new memo — it would need to go back to a federal court in northern Florida and convince a judge to dissolve the agreement. That's a fundamentally different legal obstacle than anything a policy reversal alone could create.
This matters because the Biden playbook was always about exploiting the gap between what the law says and what an administration can get away with before courts intervene. Parole authority existed in statute. The Biden team simply decided that a tool meant for individual cases could be scaled to millions. By the time courts caught up, the people were already here.
The consent decree closes that gap preemptively. It doesn't rely on the next Republican president remembering to reverse the policy on day one. It doesn't depend on Congress passing legislation that Senate rules would likely kill. It creates a durable, enforceable boundary that exists independent of who holds the White House.
Nearly 3 million people entered the country through a system that a federal court has now declared unlawful. The programs that admitted them have been suspended. The legal mechanism that enabled them has been locked for 15 years. And the administration that built them never responded to a request for comment.
The decree speaks for itself.
Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell appeared virtually before the House Oversight Committee on Monday from a federal prison camp in Texas, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and refused to answer a single question. Her lawyer then made the play everyone saw coming: Maxwell will talk — but only if President Trump grants her clemency.
The 64-year-old is serving a 20-year sentence. She has every incentive to deal and almost no leverage to do it with. Yet her attorney, David Oscar Markus, framed the offer as something close to a public service.
"If this Committee and the American public truly want to hear the unfiltered truth about what happened, there is a straightforward path. Ms. Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump."
The White House has denied that clemency is under consideration.
Markus didn't stop at the clemency gambit. According to the New York Post, he volunteered an unsolicited declaration on behalf of his client — one that conveniently names the two most powerful men whose orbits intersected with Jeffrey Epstein's.
"Both President Trump and President Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing."
He then added:
"Ms. Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation."
Think about what's happening here. Maxwell won't answer questions under oath before Congress, but her lawyer will assert — without cross-examination, without evidence, without sworn testimony — that two presidents are clean. That's not transparency. That's a press release dressed in legal clothing.
If Maxwell truly possesses exculpatory information about powerful figures, the place to deliver it is under oath, subject to questioning, with the full weight of perjury consequences behind every word. Not through a lawyer's statement on X. The Fifth Amendment exists for good reason, but you don't get to invoke it and simultaneously shop your version of events through your attorney's social media account.
This isn't Maxwell's first attempt at controlled disclosure. Trump's Justice Department already interviewed her in prison last year. She testified to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on July 24 and 25 under limited immunity protection.
The result was underwhelming. Maxwell provided almost no new information about Epstein's infamous associates — a list that includes Prince Andrew, former Harvard President Larry Summers, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. On the subject of Trump specifically, Maxwell said she:
"never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way."
Days after that interview, Maxwell was transferred from a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to a medium-security camp in Texas — a facility reportedly nicknamed "Club Fed." No official reason for the transfer has been provided.
Meanwhile, a DOJ memo released on July 6 concluded that Epstein held no "client list" and that no additional co-conspirators would be charged. A joint DOJ-FBI document concluded Epstein committed suicide in his Manhattan jail cell on August 10, 2019, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer announced at least five more depositions following Maxwell's non-event Monday:
Comer told reporters after the deposition that the committee still has serious work to do.
"We had many questions to ask about the crimes she and Epstein committed — as well as questions about potential co-conspirators."
"We sincerely want to get to the truth for the American people and justice for survivors. That's what this is about."
Comer said he was open to hearing from more Epstein associates but hasn't committed to further interviews, including with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. According to emails released by the Justice Department, Lutnick planned to visit Epstein's private Caribbean island, Little St. James, in 2012 — though Lutnick told the New York Post he broke off contact with the financier around 2005.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who co-authored legislation allowing ongoing DOJ disclosures, submitted seven questions he wanted Maxwell to answer before Monday's deposition. Among them: whether Maxwell could verify a claim made in a December filing by her own legal team — that 29 Epstein associates had secret non-prosecution agreements, and whether she or Epstein would "arrange, facilitate, or provide access to underage girls to President Trump."
That last question tells you everything about where Democrats want this investigation to land. Not on the bipartisan constellation of powerful men who populated Epstein's world. Not on the systemic failures that let a convicted sex offender serve 13 months — most of it on work release — after pleading guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Not on the institutional rot that allowed Epstein to build his operation across decades.
They want a headline with one name in it.
Every few months, the Epstein story resurfaces with the promise that this time the truth will come out. It never does. Maxwell won't talk without a deal. The DOJ says no client list and no further charges are coming. The powerful men adjacent to Epstein's crimes have spent years lawyering up, and the victims are still waiting for something resembling accountability.
The clemency offer is a sideshow — a convicted sex trafficker trying to negotiate her way out of a 20-year sentence by dangling information she could provide under oath right now, today, if she chose to. She doesn't need a pardon to tell the truth. She needs a pardon to avoid the consequences of everything else.
When Trump was asked about a potential pardon in November, he was characteristically noncommittal:
"I haven't even thought about. I haven't thought about it for months. Maybe I haven't thought about it all. But I don't talk about that. I don't rule it in or out."
The depositions will continue through March. The Clintons are both scheduled. Epstein's inner circle — his accountant, his lawyer — will face questions. Whether any of it produces genuine revelations or just more Fifth Amendment invocations remains to be seen.
But one thing is already clear: the people who know the most about Jeffrey Epstein's crimes have the least interest in sharing what they know — unless the price is right.