by Steve Benen | Apr 3, 2026 | Justice Department, Maddowblog, News, Politics
As a rule, when members of Congress refer someone to the Justice Department for prosecution, it sounds dramatic, but there is no guarantee that prosecutors will take the referral seriously. The DOJ might appreciate a heads up from lawmakers about suspected wrongdoing, but it’s just as likely to ignore the recommendations.
It was just last month when the House Republicans’ Jan. 6 committee, which is intended to serve as a conservative counterweight to the actual, bipartisan Jan. 6 select committee that wrapped up its historic work in 2022, asked Main Justice to go after Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
According to the partisan panel led by Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, Hutchinson lied to Congress about Donald Trump’s awareness for violence ahead of the insurrectionist riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
Under normal circumstances, the DOJ would blow off a criminal referral like this, recognizing it as more of a political stunt than a serious recommendation. However, note this detail that featured in a report The New York Times published Thursday on the DOJ’s efforts to please the president by pursuing his political foes:
[Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche] have gotten the president’s message. They have stepped up efforts to investigate several other Trump targets. … They have also pushed prosecutors to investigate a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to two officials briefed on the effort.
While MS NOW hasn’t independently verified this reporting, it dovetails with everything we’ve seen and learned about the White
by Steve Benen | Apr 3, 2026 | Congress, Justice Department, Maddowblog, News, Politics
While many of the officials ousted by Donald Trump are given some kind of consolation prize (more often than not, an ambassadorship), outgoing Attorney General Pam Bondi will receive no such treat. When the president fired her on Thursday following 14 months of failure, he said she’d move to an unspecified “important new job in the private sector.”
At that point, the Florida Republican might’ve thought that she’d exit public office and wait for history to decide whether she was the worst attorney general in American history or merely among the worst attorneys general in American history.
But on Capitol Hill, some lawmakers aren’t done with Bondi just yet.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, issued a lengthy and brutal statement about the attorney general’s firing on Thursday afternoon, highlighting the scope and scale of Bondi’s dreadful tenure atop the Justice Department, which included this paragraph:
Pam Bondi used the machinery of federal law enforcement not to pursue justice, but to carry out political vendettas at the direction of the President. Her firing today is long overdue, but it does not erase the damage done and it does not absolve her of accountability. Democrats in Congress will continue to investigate, expose, and hold Pam Bondi and others at DOJ accountable for their serial abuses of power and their betrayals of the Constitution.
This is not an uncommon sentiment. Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, similarly said in a statement on Bondi, “She will not escape accountability.”
Indeed, the oversight panel that Garcia helps lead was scheduled to depose Bondi on April 14
by Steve Benen | Apr 3, 2026 | Economy, Maddowblog, News, Politics
Expectations heading into this week showed projections of about 59,000 new jobs being created in the United States in March. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the totals exceeded those expectations. CNBC reported:
Nonfarm payrolls rose a seasonally adjusted 178,000 during the month, a reversal from the 133,000 decline in February and better than the Dow Jones consensus estimate for 59,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. February’s number was revised down by 41,000 while January was revised up by 34,000 to 160,000, putting the three-month average around 68,000.
With job creation higher, the unemployment rate edged lower to 4.3%.
It’s worth emphasizing for context that a major nursing strike in California and Hawaii depressed payrolls in February by tens of thousands of jobs, and now that those labor disputes have been resolved, those now count as new jobs in March. Still, 178,000 is a good overall number.
Indeed, though the data will be revised in the coming months, the preliminary totals suggest that March showed the best job growth of Trump’s second term, though the 178,000 jobs falls short of the 237,000 jobs created in December 2024 — the last full month of Joe Biden’s term.
All told, the U.S. economy has added 321,000 jobs over Donald Trump’s 15-month second term. Over the previous 15 months, the economy added roughly 1.9 million jobs.
While March’s totals are certainly a step in the right direction, the overall picture still reflects a stunning reversal, which the Republican administration has made no credible effort to explain or justify.
To contextualize the data, I put together this chart to show
by Steve Benen | Apr 2, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
In the recent past, there were still some hopes that Donald Trump would face criminal accountability for the events of Jan. 6 and his actions after his 2020 defeat. Those hopes were dashed, however, by the results of the 2024 election and the demise of former special counsel Jack Smith’s case against the president.
There is, however, another potential avenue for accountability: a series of civil lawsuits filed against Trump. The president and his lawyers have long insisted that he should be immune from the suits, but a federal judge came to a very different conclusion. Roll Call reported:
President Donald Trump must still face civil lawsuits seeking to hold him accountable for his role in the lead up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a long-running litigation from Democratic House members and Capitol Police officers.
Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in an opinion found that a range of actions Trump took leading up to the attack did not qualify for the legal immunity presidents have for official acts.
The judge ruled there are some official acts from Jan. 6 for which he cannot be held liable in civil cases, but the president’s remarks at the Ellipse, shortly before the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, are fair game — because, as Mehta concluded, they can “plausibly” be seen as remarks that incited violence.
This was clearly not the outcome Trump was hoping for. By the same token, this was excellent news for those who filed the cases against the president, including police officers who were injured during the
by Steve Benen | Apr 2, 2026 | Iran Tensions, Maddowblog, News, Politics
More than a month into the war in Iran, there’s still great uncertainty about why the United States launched this military offensive in the first place. There’s reason to believe, however, that the conflict has something to do with Iran’s nuclear program.
At an unrelated White House event on Tuesday, for example, Donald Trump said, “I had one goal: They will have no nuclear weapon, and that goal has been attained.”
It was a curious comment, in part because by the president’s own assessment, Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapon before he decided to launch the war, and in part because Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week presented the administration’s four major objectives in the conflict, none of which had anything to do with Iran’s nuclear program.
As for whether Trump’s newly manufactured “goal” has actually been “attained,” The New York Times reported, “Unless something changes over the next two weeks — the target Mr. Trump set to begin withdrawing from the conflict — he will have left the Iranians with 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough for 10 to a dozen bombs. The country will retain control over an even larger inventory of medium-enriched uranium that, with further enrichment, could be turned into bomb fuel, if the Iranians can rebuild that capacity after a month of steady bombing.”
The American president has acknowledged that these details are true, though he apparently no longer cares. Ahead of an Oval Office address to the nation about the war in Iran, the Republican spoke to Reuters about his perspective:
Of the enriched uranium, Trump said: ‘That’s so far underground, I don’t care about that.’
‘We’ll always
by Steve Benen | Apr 1, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
One of the oddities of Donald Trump’s personnel choices in his second term is how often he has chosen failed GOP candidates for important positions. Indeed, the White House seems to be a jobs program for Republicans who’ve been rejected by voters, hiring so many failed candidates that Roll Call last year said the president had created a “Team of Losers.”
Dan Bishop, however, appears to be a unique example, largely because of the number of positions he’s been assigned.
The North Carolina Republican served three terms in Congress before making a surprise move in 2024, announcing he was giving up his House seat to run for state attorney general. He lost that race, in an otherwise good year for GOP candidates.
In early 2025, he was tapped to serve as the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Then last fall, the White House rewarded Bishop with an even more plum assignment: U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina.
To his many critics, this was not good news. As my MS NOW colleague Ja’han Jones explained in November, Bishop has earned a reputation as an election denier who believes in using the courts to go after his political and ideological foes. Putting him in charge of a federal prosecutors’ office seemed like a spectacularly bad idea.
Five months later, the North Carolinian has taken on yet another role in the administration. The Wall Street Journal reported on the latest developments in Team Trump’s crusade to target the president’s defeat in the 2020 election:
Senior officials across the Trump administration are now hunting for an array of evidence to support Trump’s claim
