2025-11-19 20:30:00
Imagine: you are at a baseball game, but something is off. When the blue team is at bat, the umpire calls every pitch a strike. But when the red team is up, the umpire won’t call a single one. When a red batter hits the ball into a blue player’s glove—out!—the umpire sends him to first base anyway. You can’t believe what you are seeing. This is crazy, right? This is crazy. You look around. Does everyone else see what is happening?
Twenty years ago, John Roberts promised that as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he would be like an umpire, calling balls and strikes. His promise charmed senators and the media, who believed that his predilection for executive power and long-held antipathy for civil rights could be moderated by this commitment to faithfully apply the law. The delusion was so powerful that for two decades, the media defaulted to portraying him as a moderate institutionalist, pointing to high-profile decisions—to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census—in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy. But those decisions were always the exception. Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian autocracy, it’s become clear that Roberts’ promise to be a neutral umpire was a lie. We are watching a rigged game, and Roberts set it up.
Trump needed Roberts to win—and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts.
The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way. In a matter of months, the court’s 6–3 GOP-aligned majority has permitted a long list of lawless actions, including firing independent agency commissioners, using racial profiling in immigration sweeps, disappearing immigrants to authoritarian and war-torn nations, and defying Congress’ power of the purse. But the court’s acquiescence to an antidemocratic America didn’t start in 2025. Roberts has been embedding white-dominant authoritarianism into the country’s source code for two decades. It’s impossible to imagine today’s crisis without the Roberts court having first undermined the foundations of our democracy.
“You really can trace, in so many ways, the moment we’re in to critical decisions surrounding our law of democracy,” says Ryan Doerfler, a Harvard Law professor who studies the judiciary’s role in a democratic system.
Democracies are built on the right to vote and choose representatives. The United States finally recognized this right for all people with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But over the last five decades, Roberts has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that skirmish when Congress overwhelmingly voted to strengthen the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, helping craft a string of rulings kneecapping the law, starting with his 2013 opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. The decision overruled Congress and freed states with histories of discrimination to change their voting rules, spurring the creation of 115 voter suppression laws in more than 30 states. Many were inspired by Trump’s election lies.
In 2019, Roberts toppled another pillar of democratic governance—if you don’t like a politician, you can vote them out—by writing in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal judges could not even review claims of partisan gerrymandering, deeming them “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In the decision, Roberts pinkie-swore that courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting,” but now the Supreme Court is on the verge of making that nearly impossible. After October’s oral arguments in a Louisiana redistricting case, observers expect Roberts and the GOP justices to declare that districts drawn to preserve representation for voters of color are either unconstitutional or subject to insurmountable barriers. It’s a decision that would turn the 14th and 15th Amendments—passed under Reconstruction to give formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal rights—on their heads, and turbocharge Trump’s gerrymandering push. Such redrawn maps could shift up to 19 seats to the GOP in 2026 and “really runs the threat of just creating permanent GOP control of Congress,” Doerfler warns.
Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people—he handed it to billionaires. His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not “lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold. There’s a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return.
The chief justice didn’t wait till he was on the Supreme Court to empower Republican presidents—he auditioned for the job by showing his willingness to break the rules and come through for his team. In 2004, as a DC appeals court judge, he landed on a panel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s attempt to circumvent both the Geneva Conventions and the US justice system’s protections to try enemy combatants in military tribunals. As he considered the case, Roberts attended a series of secret meetings with top administration officials about joining the Supreme Court. Rather than recuse, and in violation of a federal conflict of interest law, Roberts signed on to a sweeping victory for Bush the same week his nomination was made official—a decision that endorsed vast new executive powers. His opinion went too far for his future colleagues on the Supreme Court, who soon struck it down. But it wouldn’t be the last time Roberts made such a bargain with the leader of his party.
The Roberts court has spent Trump’s second term not applying the law so much as clearing it out of his way.
Nor was it out of character. When Reagan entered the White House, Democrats controlled the House, and Roberts pitched in on Justice Department efforts to increase the president’s powers by cooking up the unitary executive theory—the idea that a president has absolute authority over the entire executive branch. Once he reached the high court, Roberts began to write the theory into law, usually by expanding the president’s power to fire officials Congress vested with independence. But even with the Roberts court’s increasingly radical record—from its elimination of the right to reproductive choice to allowing businesses to deny services to LGBTQ clients—many legal analysts argued that Roberts would draw the line at saying the Constitution protected presidents from criminal liability. As Trump’s lawyer conceded in a lower court, such a ruling would mean a president could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival with impunity. But the assertions that the Roberts court wouldn’t go so far as to give the president the power of a king proved to be wishful thinking. On July 1, 2024, Roberts’ infamous decision in Trump v. United States granted presidents criminal immunity for official acts. Legal scholars were aghast. But University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq notes that the decision is the capstone to a chain of Roberts’ opinions endorsing the unitary executive theory, thereby granting “the presidency the option, essentially, to opt out of statutory laws.”
Upon regaining office in January 2025, Trump immediately put this to the test, firing inspectors general, dismantling agencies created by Congress, withholding spending appropriated by Congress, removing regulators protected by Congress, and defying numerous other laws. As if to underline his lawyer’s courtroom admission on assassination, Trump has had boatloads of civilians killed over his baseless accusations that they were trafficking narcotics.
We are now operating under a Robertsian reimagining of the separation of powers, in which laws passed by Congress are mere suggestions for a monarchical president. “By creating out of whole cloth this ‘presidents can commit crimes with immunity’ doctrine that is anathema to the Constitution and rule of law, the Roberts court validated Trump’s view of himself as above the law, beholden to no one,” says Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, which advocates for adding justices to alter the court’s makeup.
Long before Roberts and his colleagues assented to Trump’s lawless second term, they helped him get one. Not since 2000, when the justices put George W. Bush in the White House, has the court done so much to pick a president. In March 2024, the court overruled Colorado’s decision to keep Trump off its ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars oath-breaking insurrectionists from office. Given that Trump had sicced an armed mob on the US Capitol, Colorado’s Supreme Court found that he fit the bill, but the justices disagreed that the state could remove his name. In an unsigned decision, five conservative justices invented new law by saying only Congress could enforce Section 3, and only in the specific way the court dictated. Meanwhile, as special counsel Jack Smith waited to move Trump’s election interference case forward that spring, the court delayed reaching a decision on presidential immunity that could have allowed a trial. When it did, four months after the Colorado ruling, Roberts’ opinion instead effectively halted the prosecution. That November, Trump won.
By then, the Roberts court had handed Trump almost unlimited power to defy the law without accountability. And once Trump was back in office, it weaponized the shadow docket to bless his lawless actions, reversing lower court findings, often without a word of explanation. As of this writing, the right-wing majority has used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s actions roughly 90 percent of the time, repeatedly bailing him out of any obligation to follow the law. These unexplained rulings have befuddled judges charged with applying the high court’s precedent. That’s because Roberts has totally replaced the rule of law with partisan loyalty—for example, ruling that ICE can consider race when seizing people off the street while colleges can’t when admitting students, which is consistent only insofar as both outcomes are supported by Republicans, or letting Trump withhold funds appropriated by Congress in defiance of the legislature’s spending power. In the birthright citizenship case, the 6–3 majority used the shadow docket not only to overrule lower courts’ orders blocking an obviously unconstitutional policy, but to more broadly strip them of authority to fully stop any lawless president—rigging the underlying system of checks and balances to help Trump.
“This is the third moment in the country’s history where court reform was a mainstream political topic.”
Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts. The court’s increasing radicalism had been fueling a movement for reform by adding justices or enacting term limits. The court had also spent the past year under an ethical cloud, beginning with the revelation that Justice Clarence Thomas had secretly taken millions of dollars in gifts, vacations, and loans from a handful of billionaires with interests before the court. Thomas also refused to recuse himself from January 6–related cases, even though his wife had fought to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss. Justice Samuel Alito also didn’t recuse, despite flying flags outside his homes that valorized Trump’s failed coup. Congress was demanding answers, and calls for an enforceable ethics code were growing. Moreover, Thomas and Alito were in their mid-70s, raising the odds that if Trump lost, the court could flip to a liberal majority. So Roberts did what he had done for Bush in 2005—he gave the president broad new powers, and in so doing secured them for himself.
His corrupt bargain has had an exorbitant cost, both for the nation and the court’s reputation. “The court has traded public legitimacy as a significant basis for its authority in favor of just alignment with the GOP,” Doerfler says. As the justices keep rushing to Trump’s aid, Democrats grow more open to reform if they return to power—and thus Roberts lashes himself more tightly to Trump’s mast. “It seems like what the court is trying to do is maximize the likelihood of future GOP control,” Doerfler says. Beyond likely finishing off the VRA this term, the court is weighing one of the last remaining limits on billionaires financing campaigns; it’s no mystery how the justices are likely to rule.
At this point, the court is in a love triangle with Republicans and billionaires, facilitating a jurisprudence that subordinates workers’ rights and responsive democracy to the whims of the ultra-rich. Beyond Thomas, Alito, too, has accepted private trips from Republican billionaires and recently began hobnobbing with a right-wing German princess. Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, both from well-off families, enjoy summer jaunts in Europe paid for by the same billionaires who bankroll the conservative legal movement and its Supreme Court recruitment process. Roberts appears to have avoided such overtly compromising relationships, but he hasn’t needed them, with his wife bringing in millions as a legal recruiter for top law firms, including some that have argued cases before her husband.
The ethics scandals could explain some of Roberts’ and his colleagues’ recent decisions, like how they’ve consistently torn down public corruption law on the premise that bribery is just a part of politics. “The eager embrace and encouragement that you’ve seen from the Roberts court for Trump’s lawlessness is just marinating in the right-wing justices’ belief that rules don’t apply to them either,” Lipton-Lubet says. “Justices who are comfortable taking essentially undisclosed bribes from fellow ideologues end up deciding that the president they support is above the law. They’ve created this culture for themselves of accountability-free corruption, and that extends, I think, to the way that they view the administration.” She adds, “You can only live in a rule-free environment for so long before it cooks your brain.”
The question lingering over this mess is how it will end. The past may be instructive. “This is the third moment in the country’s history where court reform was a mainstream political topic,” Doerfler says. In 1857, the Supreme Court held in Dred Scott that Black people could not be citizens. The decision helped spur the Civil War and was overturned by the Reconstruction amendments, which ended slavery and aimed to extend political equality to the newly freed. When President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration fought the Depression, the Supreme Court struck down his initiatives, most notably attempts to regulate industrial policy and stabilize farming, as well as a minimum wage law. Ultimately, Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court cowed the justices, who permitted New Deal legislation like Social Security and labor laws to endure.
In the 1930s, the court itself changed. The justices chose to preserve the institution, with four retiring in quick succession, allowing Roosevelt to appoint new ones. But in the postbellum era, the opposite had occurred. Attempts to guarantee equality under the law and Constitution were rolled back by a Supreme Court that, by 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, officially gave Jim Crow the Constitution’s blessing.
Today’s court is on the same trajectory, bent on retrenching white political dominance. But it will go further. It will greenlight Trump’s corrupt, self-enriching behavior and unlawful power grabs. The majority will instinctively know that its fate is tied to the fate of Trump’s movement, and so it will protect it. The result will be a democracy in name only.
Under the Roberts court, it won’t be enough to rewrite the rules of the game. The umpires are the problem.
2025-11-19 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Restrictions on solar and wind farms are proliferating around the country, with scores of local governments going as far as to forbid large-scale clean-energy developments.
Now, residents of an Ohio county are pushing back on one such ban on renewables—a move that could be a model for other places where clean energy faces severe restrictions.
Ohio has become a hotspot for anti-clean-energy rules. As of this fall, more than three dozen counties in the state have outlawed utility-scale solar in at least one of their townships.
In Richland County, the ban came this summer, when county commissioners voted to bar economically significant solar and wind projects in 11 of the county’s 18 townships. Almost immediately, residents formed a group called the Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development to try and reverse the stricture.
“To me, it just is bad for the county — the whole county, not just one or two townships.”
By September, they’d notched a crucial first victory, collecting enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot. Next May, when Ohioans head to the polls to vote in primary races, residents of Richland County will weigh in on a referendum that could ultimately reverse the ban. It’s the first time a county’s renewable-energy ban will be on the ballot in Ohio.
From the very beginning, “it was just a whirlwind,” said Christina O’Millian, a leader of the Richland County group. Like most others, she didn’t know a ban was under consideration until shortly before July 17, when the commission voted on it.
“We felt as constituents that we just hadn’t been heard,” O’Millian said. She views renewable energy as a way to attract more economic development to the county while reining in planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
Brian McPeek, another of the group’s leaders and a manager for the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, sees solar projects as huge job opportunities for the union’s members. “They provide a ton of work, a ton of man-hours.”
Many petition signers “didn’t want the commissioners to make that decision for them,” said Morgan Carroll, a county resident who helped gather signatures. “And there was a lot of respect for farmers having their own property rights” to decide whether to lease their land.
While the Ohio Power Siting Board retains general authority over where electricity generation is built, a 2021 state law known as Senate Bill 52 lets counties ban solar and wind farms in all or part of their territories. Meanwhile, Ohio law prevents local governments from blocking fossil-fuel or nuclear projects.
The Richland County community group is using a process under SB 52 to challenge the renewable-energy ban via referendum. Under that law, the organization had just 30 days from the commissioners’ vote to collect signatures in support of the ballot measure.
All told, more than 4,300 people signed the petition, though after the county Board of Elections rejected hundreds of signatures as invalid, the final count ended up at 3,380—just 60 more than the required threshold of 8 percent of the number of votes in the last governor’s election.
Although the Richland County ban came as a surprise to many, it was months in the making.
In late January, Sharon Township’s zoning committee asked the county to forbid large wind and solar projects there. After discussion at their February 6 meeting, the county commissioners wrote to all 18 townships in Richland to see if their trustees also wanted a ban. A draft fill-in-the-blanks resolution accompanied the letter.
Signed resolutions came back from 11 townships. The commissioners then took up the issue again on July 17. Roughly two dozen residents came to the meeting, and a majority of those who spoke on the proposal were against it. Commissioners deferred to the township trustees.
“The township trustees who were in favor of the prohibition strongly believe that they were representing the wishes of their residents, who are farming communities, who are not fans of seeing potential farmland being taken up for large wind and solar,” Commissioner Tony Vero told Canary Media.
He pointed out that the ban doesn’t cover the seven remaining townships and all municipal areas. “I just thought it was a pretty good compromise,” he said.
The concerns over putting solar panels or wind turbines on potential farmland echo land-use arguments that have long dogged rural clean-energy developments—and which have been elevated into federal policy by the Trump administration this year. Groups linked to the fossil-fuel industry have pushed these arguments in Ohio and beyond.
“It’s a false narrative that they care about prime farmland,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, which helped the Richland County group collect signatures to petition for the referendum. Income from leasing some land for renewable energy can help farmers keep property in their families, and plenty of acreage currently goes to growing crops for fuel—not food. “We can’t eat ethanol corn,” she added.
Under Ohio’s SB 52, counties—not townships—have the authority to issue blanket prohibitions over large solar and wind farms, with limited exceptions for projects already in the grid manager’s queue.
In Richland County’s case, the commissioners decided to defer to townships even though they didn’t have to.
The choice shows how SB 52 has led to “an inconsistently applied, informal framework that has created confusion about the roles of counties, townships, and the Ohio Power Siting Board,” said Chris Tavenor, general counsel for the Ohio Environmental Council. Under the law, “county commissioners should be carefully considering all the factors at play,” rather than deferring to townships.
“I think it’s important for my children to have…the opportunities that go along with having wind and solar.”
Even without a restriction in place, SB 52 lets counties nix new solar or wind farms on a case-by-case basis before they’re considered by the Ohio Power Siting Board. And when projects do go to the state regulator, counties and townships appoint two ad hoc decision-makers who vote on cases with the rest of the board.
As electricity prices continue to rise across Ohio, Tavenor hopes the state’s General Assembly will reconsider SB 52, which he and other advocates say is unfairly restrictive toward solar and wind—two of the cheapest and quickest energy sources to deploy. “Lawmakers should be looking to repeal it and make a system that actually responds to the problems facing our electric grid right now,” he said.
Commissioner Vero, for his part, said he has mixed feelings about the referendum. “It’s America, and if there’s enough signatures to get on the ballot, more power to people,” he said. However, he objects to the fact that SB 52 allows voters countywide to sign the petition, even if they don’t live in one of the townships with a ban, and said he hopes the legislature will amend the law to prevent that from happening elsewhere.
Yet referendum supporters say the ban matters for the entire county. “It affects everybody, whether you live in a city, a township, or a village,” McPeek said.
As he sees it, restrictions will deter investment from not only companies that build wind and solar but also those that want to be able to access renewable energy. “To me, it just is bad for the county—the whole county, not just one or two townships.”
Renewable-energy projects also provide substantial amounts of tax revenue or similar PILOT payments for counties, helping fund schools and other local needs. “I think it’s important for my children to have more clean electric [energy] and all the opportunities that go along with having wind and solar,” Carroll said.
Now that the referendum is on the ballot, the Richland County group will work to build more support and get out the vote next spring. “Education and outreach in the community is basically what we’re going to focus on for the campaign coming up in the next few months,” O’Millian said.
“So now it goes to a countywide vote, and the population of the county gets to make that decision, instead of three guys,” McPeek said.
2025-11-19 19:00:00
This story was co-published with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America.
In September, the US Department of Justice sued the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, alleging that it had deprived “thousands of law-abiding” Californians of their fundamental rights. The lawsuit—spearheaded by the DOJ’s storied Civil Rights Division—was unusual. It didn’t take aim at the notorious “deputy gangs” that have operated inside the sheriff’s department for decades. Nor did it target the department’s former leadership for allegedly stonewalling outside investigations of deputies suspected of abusing detainees. Instead, the DOJ accused LA County’s top cop of slow-walking concealed carry permits in a “systematic obstruction” of Second Amendment rights.
Under Trump and Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division has morphed into a potent weapon in MAGA’s nonstop culture battles.
The case—which the Trump administration touted as the DOJ’s first-ever “affirmative lawsuit in support of gun owners”—relies on a decades-old statute intended to help the feds crack down on local law enforcement agencies engaged in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations. It’s the latest sign that under President Donald Trump, the Civil Rights Division has made a hard break with its onetime commitment to protecting the politically disempowered and has morphed into a potent weapon in MAGA’s nonstop culture battles.
“First-of-its-kind lawsuit dropped—the Second Amendment rights of Californians will NOT be trampled,” Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican activist and lawyer Trump picked to lead the Civil Rights Division, posted on X after filing the suit.
— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) September 30, 2025
First-of-its-kind lawsuit dropped—the Second Amendment rights of Californians will NOT be trampled. This @CivilRights Division will fight LA’s deliberate delays on concealed carry permits, defending your 2A rights!
https://t.co/Egh11Rivn5 pic.twitter.com/ArJXqCfNKL
Seven months into Dhillon’s tenure, the Civil Rights Division is unrecognizable. Founded in 1957, it focused initially on ensuring that Black Americans in the South had access to the ballot. Its mandate grew with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other legislation barring discrimination based on traits such as race, religion, sex, and national origin. Congress enacted the “pattern or practice” law in 1994, three years after the videotaped police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. The provision quickly became the DOJ’s chief tool for bringing oversight when officers engage in rampant, unchecked misconduct against marginalized groups.
Under the Obama administration, the DOJ used the law to force a settlement with the same LA Sheriff’s Department after finding in 2013 that officers had subjected Black and Latino people to brutal violence, illegal searches, and other forms of discrimination. Until this year, the law had never been invoked on behalf of gun owners, whose right to possess firearms for self-defense the Supreme Court recognized only in 2008.
In interviews, Civil Rights Division veterans who left during the current or previous administrations said various Trump executive orders—which often seek to undermine existing civil rights policies—are guiding enforcement. Christy Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law who served in the division and led the Obama-era investigation of the LA sheriff, said, “It’s clear that they are co-opting the division to serve an agenda that is in some ways antithetical to civil rights.”
Dhillon has an appetite for provocation and dispute. In 1988, as the editor of Dartmouth College’s right-wing student paper, she cited the school’s “liberal fascism” in defense of her decision to publish a satirical opinion piece by another student that likened the college president to Adolf Hitler and campus conservatives to Holocaust victims.
She earned a law degree in 1993 from the University of Virginia, where she was president of the school’s Federalist Society. This year, Dhillon and a DOJ deputy who is also a UVA alum went after diversity efforts at the school, intensifying a broader conservative pressure campaign to get rid of university President James Ryan, who resigned in June.
“Gun owners are not in any way an oppressed minority.”
Dhillon’s advocacy work hasn’t always been on behalf of right-wing interests. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dhillon, a practicing Sikh who immigrated from India to London to the United States as a child, helped lead efforts to protect her community from growing harassment. “While my brother, a turbaned Sikh lawyer, was being called ‘Osama’ at Candlestick Park and Sikh taxi drivers were being assaulted, we made it a priority to keep Sikhs and other Americans safe from this irrational and discriminatory violence,” she told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a written questionnaire this year. “I spent hundreds of hours drafting legal memoranda and advocacy materials for publications, training for law enforcement, and more.” Her efforts drew the notice of the ACLU of Northern California, which appointed her to a two-year stint on its board.
In the Trump era, Dhillon has become a MAGA world star. She co-chaired Lawyers for Trump in 2020, spread doubts about that year’s election results, and called on the Supreme Court to intervene on Trump’s behalf. Her private San Francisco-based firm collected $10 million from Trump’s political operation in the 2024 cycle, and it has fought against gender transition for minors, alleged anti-white bias, and the perceived stifling of conservative speech.
Dhillon has drawn occasional heat from some extreme elements on the right. Her faith became an issue in a failed 2023 bid to chair the Republican National Committee. She told Politico at the time that it had been hurtful to discover that “a handful of RNC members” had “chosen to question my fitness to run the RNC by using my devout Sikh faith as a weapon against me.” Dhillon delivered a Sikh prayer at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in 2024, prompting a particularly venomous response from some commentators.
But Dhillon retained Trump’s loyalty. She’s become a key figure in implementing the president’s legal agenda and has worked overtime to mollify powerful firearms groups that, at times, have criticized the Trump DOJ for being insufficiently aggressive in opposing gun control laws.
Satisfying the gun rights crowd is work that Dhillon—whose former private firm dabbles in Second Amendment law—touts publicly. Neither she nor the DOJ responded to written questions for this story. But in a recent issue of the Dartmouth alumni magazine, Dhillon suggested that the division’s gun rights work is just getting underway, telling an interviewer that “we’re forming a Second Amendment section of the Civil Rights Division. That’s never been done before.”
The concealed carry lawsuit against the LA Sheriff’s Department, which is the division’s highest-profile move on behalf of gun interests, isn’t frivolous. The county’s permit program has indeed been plagued by delays, and last year, in a lawsuit brought by gun rights groups, a federal judge found that the agency had likely violated the plaintiffs’ Second Amendment rights.
Yet the existence of a well-resourced private lawsuit highlights another way in which the Civil Rights Division’s intervention marks a departure from past practice. Historically, it has stepped in to uphold the rights of those with limited political clout and access to levers of power. “Proponents of Second Amendment rights have an abundance of political power that has allowed them to not only protect, but dramatically extend their rights,” said Lopez, the former DOJ official now at Georgetown. “Just because they don’t always get what they want, or because there are some process issues in getting them what they want, doesn’t mean they are a politically marginalized group.”
“It was extremely shocking to see the press release.”
Before bringing a pattern or practice suit, the DOJ typically issues a report that sums up evidence the government has collected. These reports alert the public to substantiated misconduct and can be a basis for settlements. When the DOJ settled with the LA sheriff in 2015, reforms were tailored to the findings that the DOJ had made public two years before. The DOJ released no such report before filing its concealed carry suit in September. In March, when the agency first announced its investigation of the permit delays, lawyers who specialized in law enforcement oversight were caught unaware, said several division attorneys who left this year. “It was extremely shocking to see the press release,” said one, who spoke anonymously to share internal details of the episode. “It was just such a sharp departure from the norm.”
Lopez has written critically of the division across administrations, arguing that it has too often favored symbolic gestures over aggressive enforcement and that it has been overly attuned to political considerations. Though imperfect, she said the division has done vital work. While allowing that a scenario like the permit delays in LA may lead to constitutional rights violations, she said the suit is a dubious use of limited resources. Lopez fears that such moves could undermine the legitimacy of the division and the broader federal government.
“I am worried that once this administration is gone, the ability of the division to enforce civil rights protections will be forever compromised,” Lopez said. “And it will be viewed as what it is now, this cynical, entirely political division, which is actually pushing an anti-equity agenda.”
Career staff and leadership have been forced out under Dhillon. Figures the DOJ gave Congress and a list of departures released in October by Justice Connection, a network of agency alumni, suggest that nearly 400 people, including 75 percent of attorneys, have left the division since January. When Dhillon gave an interview to her former client Tucker Carlson in May, she described the reaction of career DOJ attorneys to her arrival. “They had crying sessions, struggle sessions,” she said. “There was open crying in the halls.”
A recently departed DOJ lawyer, who spoke anonymously to provide details on the current situation, said: “It’s almost impossible to quantify losing three-quarters of the expertise of the Civil Rights Division. The people who are left, God bless them, are treading water and cannot pursue the work that is necessary to defend the constitutional rights of every American.”
The division’s focus, the lawyer noted, has shifted dramatically. Under Trump and Dhillon, “it has targeted universities that allowed peaceful student protests, rather than standing up to landlords extorting sex from vulnerable women, police departments engaged in widespread use of excessive force, and the jailing of people who are unable to pay petty fines.”
Before Trump was reelected, there were more than 30 attorneys in the unit enforcing the pattern or practice law, the lawyer said. There are now three, they said. In the private suit brought by gun groups against the LA sheriff—in which the parties reached a tentative settlement October 31—six attorneys represented the plaintiffs.
Lawyers newly tapped to serve in Dhillon’s division include an attorney who represented January 6 rioters and likened them to victims of the Nazis and a GOP activist from Florida who called Covid-19 vaccines “the mark of the beast.” There have been wholesale mission reversals. Citing concerns over “election integrity,” the division has sued to obtain voter information in blue states and dispatched staff to six heavily Latino counties in California and New Jersey to “ensure transparency, ballot security, and compliance with federal law.” Last week, the division joined a suit filed by the California GOP, alleging that congressional maps recently approved by state voters—an effort by Democrats to counteract recent Republican-led gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere—are themselves illegal. Dhillon’s former law firm is representing the state GOP in the case, and Dhillon is recused from the case.
Entire areas of work, like oversight of police departments and prisons, have been largely shelved and the division’s work wholly subordinated, in Dhillon’s words, “to the priorities of the president.” Among those priorities, Dhillon’s focus on Second Amendment rights stands out as entirely new terrain for the division. In part, the modern gun rights movement arose in the 1970s amid a broader conservative reaction to the upheaval and shifting societal norms of the 1960s, which the Civil Rights Division reflected. In the decades since, gun advocates have adopted the resonant language and narratives of the civil rights struggle and deployed them on behalf of gun owners, who are predominantly white and male.
Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School who has studied the rhetoric of the gun debate, said arguments that gun owners are misunderstood victims of discrimination and judicial bias are, like most underdog stories, potent. However, he said there are good reasons to doubt that the Second Amendment has been relegated to “second class” status, as advocates maintain. Most states now allow gun owners to carry in public without a permit and constrain local firearms restrictions. Many states have passed anti-discrimination laws to protect gun rights, and multiple jurisdictions nationwide have refused to enforce gun laws, declaring themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries.
“Gun owners are not in any way an oppressed minority,” Zick said. “If anything, the Supreme Court and lower courts are treating the Second Amendment as a super-right. It has privileged status.”
In a federal financial disclosure completed before being confirmed as head of the Civil Rights Division, Dhillon said she planned to sell her private firm to her brother. Since her departure, Dhillon Law Group has continued to bring suits against federal agencies, including one filed in May against the DOJ seeking agency records related to former President Joe Biden’s “mental fitness.”
At the Dhillon firm, gun rights litigation has been a modest part of the practice. Firm attorneys have sued over pandemic restrictions that stifled a gun rights rally on the grounds of California’s State Capitol building, a state data breach that exposed confidential personal details of gun permit holders, and San Jose’s requirement that gun owners carry liability insurance.
The firm’s highest-profile gun rights work has been representing Rare Breed Triggers in cases involving the DOJ. Rare Breed makes forced reset triggers, which allow certain semiautomatic rifles to fire more rapidly. The company’s founder is also behind an apparel company called Pipe Hitters Union—“pipe hitter” is slang for special operations military personnel—and another that sells Spartan- and Christian Crusader-themed AR-15 components.
In a complaint that Merrick Garland’s DOJ brought against Rare Breed in 2023, the government alleged that company principals were brazen in their defiance of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, continuing to sell forced reset triggers after being told it was illegal to do so. Rare Breed objected to the basis of the suit, arguing that the government’s classification of its product as an illegal machine gun was bogus.
In August 2021, the complaint states, the ATF received a call from a number associated with the law office of one of Rare Breed’s owners. The caller said that the government was engaging in “treasonous” behavior and that they planned to assemble and protest at an ATF office. “We are bringing the rocket launcher,” the caller said. The Rare Breed owner denied any involvement in the threatening call, and a federal judge ultimately found that the government had failed to prove otherwise.
Representing Rare Breed for Dhillon Law Group in those cases was David Warrington, a founder of the National Association for Gun Rights, which was involved in related DOJ litigation. Gary Lawkowski, another attorney at the firm, represented the gun rights association. Trump named Warrington, who had worked on his campaign, as White House counsel on December 4, 2024, and Lawkowski joined him as a deputy. Trump nominated Dhillon five days later.
On May 16, the DOJ announced a settlement with Rare Breed that allows the company to sell its triggers. The settlement requires Rare Breed to refrain from selling similar devices for handguns and “to take all reasonable efforts” to enforce its patent by seeking court injunctions against copycat manufacturers. Public safety is the stated rationale for these requirements, but some in the gun world have questioned the deal, suggesting that the DOJ awarded Rare Breed a market monopoly for a product the government had previously asserted was illegal.
Patent law experts I contacted were perplexed. “It’s just strange,” said David Schwartz, who teaches intellectual property at Northwestern University’s law school. “I’ve never seen an agreement to enforce a patent as part of a settlement with the government—and this is not even a patent case.” Schwartz said the agreement could help Rare Breed defend its turf. After finding that a patent has been infringed, courts balance several factors, including the public interest, when deciding whether an injunction is warranted, he said, and the settlement could bolster Rare Breed’s arguments.
Charles Duan, a law professor at American University, said by email that the settlement confers a clear edge. “Rare Breed’s device is now effectively safe-harbored from regulation, whereas other producers would still be at risk, giving the company a huge market advantage given the patent,” Duan wrote. “The question in my mind is: Are other companies going to lobby the DOJ now to favor their patents similarly?”
Warrington withdrew from the case days before Trump’s inauguration. According to a White House official who provided information on background, neither Warrington nor Lawkowski were involved in the settlement. There is no indication that Dhillon played any role in the case. Rare Breed officials and current Dhillon Law Group attorneys who represented the company did not respond to requests for comment.
Questioned on the settlement in a June interview posted to YouTube, Rare Breed’s president, Lawrence DeMonico, dismissed the notion that the DOJ had awarded a monopoly, saying Rare Breed had always intended to enforce its IP rights, settlement or not. “We already have a government-sanctioned monopoly,” he said. “It’s called a patent.”
In addition to filing suit against the LA sheriff, Dhillon, in her DOJ role, has filed several briefs in support of gun rights groups seeking to strike down firearms restrictions. On September 22, a federal appeals court heard arguments in a challenge to an Illinois law that restricts the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The DOJ intervened, and Dhillon personally appeared in court to argue against the legislation.
“The United States has a strong interest in ensuring that the Second Amendment is not relegated to a second-class right,” she told the court, “and that all of the law-abiding citizens of this circuit remain able to enjoy the full exercise of their Second Amendment rights.” Dhillon chronicled her involvement on X, posting about her consuming preparation and noting that she was unwinding by making a needlepoint image of an eagle.
“The United States has a strong interest in ensuring that the Second Amendment is not relegated to a second-class right.”
In May, she filed a brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of challengers to a Hawaii law that restricts the carrying of guns on private property; the court will hear the case in January. Then in September, Dhillon filed a brief with the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals backing a challenge to New Jersey’s assault weapon and large-capacity magazine bans.
Until now, every appeals court to consider an assault weapon or high-capacity magazine challenge has upheld those laws, but judges in the Illinois and New Jersey cases have yet to rule. If the plaintiffs in either case prevail, it will increase the already-high likelihood that the Supreme Court will soon consider such bans, which could result in the prohibitions—one or both of which are in place in 14 Democratic-leaning states and the District of Columbia—being declared unconstitutional.
Still, gun rights groups have not been happy with all of the Trump DOJ’s moves on guns. In January, for instance, the 5th Circuit struck down a federal law that prohibits firearms dealers from selling handguns to those under 21. But the DOJ convinced a lower court to issue a narrow ruling applying only to the individual plaintiffs and members of the gun rights group behind the suit. The DOJ also urged the Supreme Court not to consider a separate challenge to the same law.
Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, said those moves are consistent with a broader pattern: Trump’s DOJ has been eager to challenge firearms restrictions in blue states, but quick to protect federal gun laws, particularly those that allow the government to prohibit certain classes of people—drug users and felons, for example—from owning guns.
“It seems as if they don’t want courts telling them whether these prohibitions are constitutional,” Willinger said of the DOJ, which is establishing a program that will allow some felons to have their gun rights restored. “They want to decide, as an executive branch matter, who is sufficiently reformed to get their guns back.”
Willinger said there’s an element of performance to the DOJ’s involvement in these cases—the agency clearly wants to be seen as crusading for gun rights. And he expects the DOJ to ally with gun rights groups in cases in which “it can most successfully characterize state or government actions as motivated by anti-gun animus.”
Among the Second Amendment groups expressing dissatisfaction with the DOJ has been the National Association for Gun Rights, the Dhillon Law Group client founded by Warrington, who now serves as White House counsel. On October 10, citing DOJ legal moves aimed at preserving federal gun laws, the group accused Attorney General Pam Bondi of having “failed the Second Amendment” and called for her firing, leading Dhillon to defend her boss.
“Please trust and believe that this is the most Second Amendment friendly Department of Justice in history,” Dhillon said in a video posted to X. “Yes, that’s a low bar, yet we’ve managed to rise way above it.”
2025-11-19 19:00:00
In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a man on a street in New York City. He was convicted of murder several years later and given the maximum sentence—25 years to life in prison—on top of three additional years for two other convictions. From behind bars, Lennon began reckoning with his crime through in-prison writing workshops and soon fell in love with journalism. He’s since made a name for himself as an incarcerated journalist and has been published in The Atlantic, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine, often writing about the criminal justice system and conditions in correctional facilities, all from the inside.
In the decades Lennon’s been behind bars, America has become increasingly fixated on stories like his —true crime—through endless podcasts, documentary series, and streaming shows. But Lennon argues that tragedy is too often being turned into entertainment. “I think with true crime, it creates this thirst for punishment,” he says.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.On this week’s More To The Story, Lennon joins with host Al Letson to discuss how his first book, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us, inverts the basic structure of the true crime genre. They also discuss how his portrayal on a cable news show hosted by Chris Cuomo inspired him to write the book and how Lennon now views the murder he committed almost a quarter-century ago.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Al Letson: Can you tell me how you ended up in Sing Sing and all about your time there?
John J. Lennon: Yeah, for sure. I’m from Brooklyn and in 2001, at 24 I was involved in a criminal lifestyle, selling drugs and shot and killed a man on Brooklyn Street. And I was sent away with a 28 years to life sentence. Yeah, I mean, along the way I found myself. I guess a turning point for me was getting stabbed at a prison and transferring to another prison, finding a writing workshop. And that was around 2010, my first piece published in 2013 and just found journalism as something to help me with just my identity. Just helped me get a life and a place where you could really feel, frankly, like a loser, like you’ve screwed up your life and hurt a lot of people along the way. So journalism helped me with my identity.
I just want to break it down a little bit. So you were a part of a criminal lifestyle in Brooklyn for a while, and so correct me if I’m wrong, but in the state of New York, if you got, I think you said 28 to life, am I correct in that?
Yes. So I was convicted of, I was already serving time for selling drugs and I was already serving another sentence for possession of a gun. So I had a whole host of criminal charges. I’m on my 24th year right now and I’ll go to the parole board in about three-ish years.
So how long into your time in jail did the stabbing happen?
Yeah, so that was probably, it was around 2008. For me, that was the turn in my story, where I started at Sing Sing, went to other different prisons. In your first years, you’re finding yourself and honestly perpetuating that behavior. I was perpetuating the behavior that got me at doing drugs, selling drugs, just up to no good, gossiping in the yard. Prison was where I belonged in the beginning, and for me, that point, it was that point when I got stabbed pretty bad in the yard, it was retaliation for the man I killed in Brooklyn.
I mean, I knew the guy who stabbed me was his friend, and at that point I got hit pretty bad and you’re like, wow. I got hit in the lung and I was just like this is, everyone knew I was getting hit but me that day in the yard. And I was just like, this is a disgusting place and I’m a disgusting person. I just want to be better. It was just, at that point I transferred to Attica and in the worst prison in New York State, I’ve got sober and I joined that writing workshop.
Yeah. I think it’s really incredible that you came from the street, you’re in prison and you’re just doing what you’ve always done, just trying to survive in there, and then this moment where you get to reflect on your life and in probably one of the worst places in the world, a place that I think nobody ever wants to go, you realize that you have to make change. I mean, making change in those circumstances has to be really hard.
Yeah, it was ground zero. I had fantastically failed in life. Attica’s a tough joint, but I had a great 12-step meeting, though. Had these really cool volunteers, and if anything’s going on in prison, it’s always through the volunteer programs, people with a lot of decency that come in this nasty place and just try to show us some love. And I got sober around the same time that another volunteer came in and he was an English professor and he came in and started showing us, started tossing us some Best American Essays and started reading some of these pieces. And it was probably around that time, it was probably helpful that I was getting sober around the time that I was learning to write because it maybe edified, maybe, my voice a bit or at least gave me some clarity with my thoughts that I was doing some work on myself.
How did you gravitate towards journalism?
There was these pieces, again, there was these essays that I would write and that we were reading and I would see where these essays were published in these Best American Essay Collection and Best American Magazine Writing, that the professor would give us these books and I just started reading these pieces and I started subscribing to those magazines. It worked for me because I had a bit of a learning disability too. I wasn’t a great reader, but I loved story and magazine writing and my mom would subscribe to these different magazines and these different, the Atlantic, Esquire, [inaudible 00:08:04], all these different magazines. And interestingly, that’s the kind of writing I took to initially. So it was by reverse engineering and I also knew, I was self-aware enough to know that I had some personality issues. I was a mess.
So tell me about that first piece, the idea that someone who’s currently locked up could become a journalist and get published in The Atlantic, one of the most prestigious magazines in the country. How did it all take place?
I think you have to feel like you have something to say. I remember it was like 2013 at the time and it was this horrible shooting in Sandy Hook and I remember I had used the same gun in my crime and everyone was talking about gun control and I was just like, I know how to get guns easy. They don’t even know what they’re talking about. So I mean, I felt like I had something to say. It just clicked for me. From the beginning, I knew that I had a lot of conflict, but I knew to lean into that, and if I could write about this in a sober way and an accountable way, and I think people would listen to what I had to say.
So after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary happens, you feel like you have something to say. What was the process of writing the essay and submitting it for possible publication?
I wrote in my cell, I was workshopping it every two weeks, the workshop, sometimes every month. You’re hanging on the red ink, hanging on the words of the professor. His name is Doran Larson, he was a Hamilton College professor who would come in. And it was like five or six of us in the group and we would hang onto his words, but he would give me some red ink. I would go back and work it. I mean, eventually it looked clean and I kept reading it out loud in my cell. I’d read other op-eds, see how they read. It was a lot of reverse engineering and I sent it out just on a whim to the Atlantic. Even he was like, “Good luck, you’re shooting for this stars there.” And I got a letter back from David Graham, who’s a writer today for The Atlantic, and he said, “Man, I’d love to publish this piece.” My life changed after that.
Wow. And so did you send it out to anybody else or just the Atlantic?
Just one shot, the Atlantic.
Wow, that’s excellent. All right, so you write this piece, the Atlantic publishes it. Talk to me about that second piece, dying in Attica. What was that about and how did it come about? Because this is the first true reported piece.
That wasn’t really my second piece. I wrote … actually a piece on Nick Kristof’s blog, so it was another gun piece. But my instructor was like, “What, are you going to be the gun guy? Write something else.”
I wrote this piece about this guy, Lenny. He was dying of colon cancer on my tier and it was just so difficult for him because he had a colostomy bag and I was just like, wow. This was around the time that I got diagnosed with Crohn’s and my mother was always in my ear, saying, “That’s a terrible disease.” I actually have a mild case of it, but back then it was on my mind and I was thinking of this guy and I was seeing how he lived and I was seeing how people were holding their noses when he changed his bag because he was a few cells down, and it was just a terrible place, prison, to live with any kind of illness. I was just like, if I could capture that, and that would be cool.
After you were finished with that piece, I mean, I’m sure that just lit a fire and you just wanted to do more of this type of journalism.
Yeah, absolutely. I didn’t really realize how significant it was, but somebody said, “You could do something with this.” I felt like they gave me the rock and I was in the game and I was just like, I have to do something with it. I just started writing more and it was good timing that The Marshall Project opened at that time. Bill Keller who’s just, he runs the New York Times. In 2014, he shifts to open up The Marshall Project. I read that in one of my subscriptions my mom gave me, I’m connecting the dots. I’m like, oh, this is big. This could be something.
And I’m like, I reach out to him and then I write that story about Lenny, the bank robber. That was the first piece that wasn’t, I jumped in a little bit with relating to him, but I really made it about him. And if I was relating to him, it was about my own reflections. I mean, it’s not like I wasn’t incapable of empathy, but it was just the work itself boosted this idea of healing for others because prison’s a place where you mind your business. Journalism transcends that.
Can you tell me a little bit about A, how you came to think of true crime as a tragedy, and then also just about these men that you have talked to and written this book about?
Yeah, so we were talking about the kind of work that I was doing initially, which I thought, and which you framed as, I appreciate the way you put it. It was just substantive journalism. And I even took it further and I started writing long form features, like in magazines and Esquire and Vice. And by 2018, I had transferred from Attica to Sing Sing, and around that time, Bill Keller and I just wrote a piece in New York Magazine about a man who was suffering from schizophrenia, actually in this block. And so I was making my rounds, like who wants to talk? Maybe I could talk about this crisis on the radio. And we actually did, we did talk on the radio. So I had reached out to somebody I knew at CNN, but I didn’t know that they were working at H.L.M. And ultimately they had sent, I told them I wanted to talk up this crisis.
She lined me up with her colleagues and told me, and they had come to see me and they wanted to do a show about my redemption, they told me in this career that I had built for myself. It was a bait and switch. It was all a lie. It came up and it was really the show. They told me show was called Inside. It was Cuomo, and it was. The first season was, but the second season was called Inside Evil and the third season was the one that they were grooming me for, and they said it wasn’t going to be Inside Evil. They said it was going to be about our stories of redemption. And I was like, “Oh wow, this is great. I’m so glad you thought of me.” And by the time they came up with Chris Cuomo, it wasn’t about that at all. So that was my experience that I had. And I didn’t walk out on Chris Cuomo because …
Well, he’s Chris Cuomo.
Yeah. And it’s like brother’s the governor. It was just a lot.
Yeah, there’s a big power imbalance there. I mean, you are a prisoner. Chris Cuomo is a celebrity, CNN, at the time, guy and his brother, at the time, was the governor of the state that you are currently in prison. I mean, tell me if I’m wrong, but it’s possible that at the time the Governor Cuomo could have pardoned you, right?
Absolutely. And he was pardoning guys I knew. I’m talking about guys in the block, in cell blocks. I’ve seen guys right next to me walk right out. What happened was they showed me that they saw me as a murderer and not as a journalist. And the reason why I wrote this book was to show, well, twofold. Personally, I had a chip on my shoulders and I felt like I had something to say. It’s the first similar feeling that I had when I started writing. And I thought I could tell better stories than this dude and I have better access.
I’m not telling these stories from a perch, but I could tell fuller stories about the men I live with and the fuller stories, Al, included the punishment thing. You mentioned these other true crime shows, these podcasts. I mean they’re structured the same way, every story. You watch one, you watch them all. Bang, bang, police tape, 911 calls, drop back, you meet the characters. But I inverted that whole structure with The Tragedy of True Crime. So I write about three men. I introduce you to them where they are, in prison with me, at different timeline, and you get to know them before you learn about their crime. But I don’t shy away from their crime. I describe their crime, but I deliver it to the reader in a different structure than traditional true crime.
Do you feel like the structure is what separates what you’re doing from true crime? Or is it the structure is born out of the idea that you’re doing something different than true crime?
Well, it’s one of the things. Voice and agency is obviously the other. I write about three men who’ve also killed, but I would argue that the three men that I write about, one of whom has been the villain his whole life, and he hasn’t known how to overcome that. I was talking about Robert Chambers. Another one is a gay man named Michael Shane Hale, who, he’s an amazing person and killed his lover. And then the third is Milton Jones, who, at 17, killed two priests. These are different crimes, but ultimately I use my own agency to put myself, I don’t judge them. I tell their stories without, I would say, a lot different than how, say for example, Chris Cuomo told my story and told the stories of other people on that show, Inside Evil.
It’s ability to tell a story. I come clean about my own crime and I try to be candid with the reader and that enables me to be a trusted narrator. With that, I’m able to tell the stories of these other men, not judge them, and at times put myself beneath them in terms of just explaining, hey, I’m actually more culpable than Michael Shane Hale, who I call Shane, but why does Brooklyn decide to execute him? Why is he the first man selected in 1995, when New York brings back the death penalty, to execute? What’s that about? And I unpack that and I explain what happened in each of these cases. But you asked the question about voice and the narrator. I’m a narrator that’s done this as well. It’s pretty unusual. When you think of a trusted narrator, you don’t think of a guy in prison who’s killed a man. So I have to reckon with that, but I try to do that early on in the book and I tell the story, with my own woven through.
Yeah. So let me ask you, I think one of the complicated parts of talking about people’s stories, especially people that have killed somebody, is really that with that is the victim and what the victim’s family has gone through as well and how you handle both parts of it. There’s a story about redemption, which everybody wants to hear. I think that redemption stories are so powerful because we all want redemption. So I think that when you hear redemption stories, it pulls you in. On the other side of that redemption story, though, is a family who lost a family member. And I’m wondering how do you balance those two?
Yeah, I mean it’s difficult. Look, I mean, I knew going into this, this book was going to be more about me having access to these guys in here, showing you what the punishment side is. I do reach out to, I think doing the work, right? At a certain point, when we think about three of the men I write about, I reach out to the family members, people that they killed.
What about the family of the man you killed? Have you been able to reach out and talk to them?
It’s one of the toughest parts of my career. Yeah, I wrote a piece in Washington Post years ago about just trying to come to terms on my own of writing an apology letter. The sister of the man I killed, she rejected it and she asked, in a letter to the Washington Post, that I not use his name in my writing. That would serve her better than my apology. I’ve respected her wishes, and that’s why I don’t refer to him by name in the piece. But look, I don’t pretend to, I understand what brings me pride, writing, I mean, it may cause her and her family more pain. Look, that causes me shame. But that whole equation, at least for me, is this idea of remorse, because this inner conflict, there’s no easy answers to that.
Yeah. No, I mean, on one side of it, you should be able to talk about your story and the things that you’ve gone through. On the other side of it, there’s a family who lost a loved one, and I think it’s fair that they don’t want to hear it.
No easy answers.
So John, I want to go back a little bit and talk about true crime. I’m wondering, in your opinion, how has the genre influenced how we view crime and the people who commit those crimes?
I think with true crime, yeah, it creates this thirst for punishment. I started critiquing this stuff before I wrote the book, Al. I started developing these ideas, critiquing other writers of true crime, New York Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine, and I started really clocking the way we consume true crime and even critiquing Dick Wolf. And Rolling Stone, I had a big piece critiquing him. It’s just about who’s telling our story and how are they telling them? That’s one of the themes that runs through The Tragedy of True Crime. You zeroed in on, I think, a fair observation. Like, wait, dude, you’re a murderer. And it’s like, what if the people that I killed, the guy you killed, his family is not really digging this? What does it mean when people that are so disconnected … crimes are the ones that are telling, that are shaping the narratives?
He grew up on the Upper East Side. What does Chris Cuomo, this guy grew up in the governor’s [inaudible 00:26:02]. That’s who y’all are relying on? What if I can develop my voice and be fair-minded about it, give it to you guys real, and also be accountable? I’m just saying that. I’m not an activist, I’m a journalist. That’s not what I’m doing. I want to create an experience, but I want to just offer an experience. I’m a narrative journalist. I’m a guy that did a pretty terrible thing. I shot a man 10 times. I was deeply immersed in this lifestyle. I reckon with that on the page and people that read my stuff, and there’s a way that I connect with them and account for what I did, and I’m not blaming the system.
Do you wrestle with the possibility that you’re a little too close to these guys to write about them objectively? Is that something that you’re constantly thinking of as you you’re writing it?
I’d be lying to myself and the reader if I’m saying that I’m an objective journalist. I think we come to life and to our work with our life experiences, and I’m writing about men in prison who live behind bars, and I also go to sleep behind bars. So I think I’d be kidding myself and the reader to say I’m 100% writing an objective story. This is a first person, immersive, [inaudible 00:27:29] personal journalist. You call it what you want. It has many names, as you know, Al. I don’t know, was Hunter Thompson being asked, “Do you think you’re an objective journalist?” This guy’s riffing about all kinds of stuff. You know what I mean? But his work had value. And he had so many flaws. As do I.
I would just, can I just say something else about the objective thing?
Yeah, please. Please do, go ahead.
I would also like to think I’m being objective with scenic writing and with these riffs and these digressions that I do in the book. For example, there’s a scene in the book where guy just offers me some drugs. I deny it. I don’t want it. I’ve relapsed after I got sober. And it’s always a struggle to stay sober in prison. And prison, the heroin now in prison has fentanyl it all in it. I remember another guy, it was just stuff going around in a cell block and there was this guy that overdosed and the COs are running to his cell and the whole block is silent and they’re going to work on this guy, the COs, the guards.
They’re doing CPR, everything. They’re running in and the whole block is silent. And everyone knows there’s drugs in the block and everyone knows that it’s probably fentanyl, but it’s just this culture that we live in. It’s awful. We’re foul. There’s parts of us that are foul in here, and I acknowledge that in the book, that these COs are like, they’re working, they’re busting their ass trying to save this guy’s life. And it’s just like they’re contending with this foul culture and it’s just awful. And that’s the culture that we live in. And I think when you create those scenes, you show what it is. There’s a lot going on right there from that scene. There’s a lot.
Yeah. How do you rise above that culture? Everything you just described sounds really hard for somebody to figure out how to navigate that.
It’s harder at the end, Al. It’s harder at the end, when you know you’ve … I’m doing this interview with you, I’m outlining a piece for the New York Review of Books, and there’s just suffering and it’s a mix of just stupidity and suffering. Difficult to not get angry at it, and then just to have empathy. It’s really difficult when you can’t shake it, you can’t get away from it. It’s hard, Al. The time gets really hard at the end, when you’ve transcended this place and it’s just tough. I mean, it was so much easier when we started this interview and I came in and I was just like, wow, I am. I belong here. I’m a low life. This is where I belong. But fast-forward 24 years and where I am today, this is the toughest time.
You’re up for parole soon, two years from now. How are you feeling about it? I mean, you must know a lot of people who have gone through the parole process in the past, so what are your thoughts going into it?
I think one of my concerns is, it’s just the idea that I think society wants us to come to prison, get our lives together, and just not be criminals and get out. Just like go get a job, don’t be bad. I never went into this thinking writing would be a passport to freedom or anything like that. You know what I wanted? I wanted to just to get a life, not be a loser. I had some green lights along the way and this has become, I found some success and I’m grateful for that. But I just hope I’m not resented for that. That’s what I fear.
2025-11-19 05:05:28
Donald Trump has never been particularly critical of the Saudis, despite a human rights record that has brought harsh condemnations from his predecessors. Unlike previous presidents and even many in his own party, Trump has generally struck a conciliatory, or even friendly, tone when dealing with the country’s ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And he has always been very clear about the reasons why.
“Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them,” Trump said at a campaign stop in 2015. “They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
“They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
The United States once had a strong relationship with the kingdom dating back decades. But in recent years, the country’s abysmal human rights record—fomenting war in Yemen and feuding with Qatar—as well as its strong grip on the oil market, have led to an often tense relationship. At least, until Trump came along.
As that tension has receded, the business relationships between the Trump family and the Saudis have only grown closer—whether through state-owned enterprises, like the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), which handles international investments of Saudi surplus money at the direction of MBS, or individual real estate developers who operate under the watchful eye of Saudi royals.
Trump’s love of golf has offered special opportunities for the Saudis. In 2022, after the PGA tour abandoned Trump for his divisive politics during his first term that culminated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the LIV Golf league brought its tour to Trump-owned golf courses. The LIV league, owned by PIF, challenged golf’s staid norms and paid players previously unheard of nine-figure salaries. It already has brought its tournament and likely multi-million dollar fees to Trump-owned golf courses seven times—with an eighth event planned in 2026 at Trump’s golf course outside Washington, D.C.
During a deposition in 2022 as part of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud lawsuit against him, Trump even intimated that he could sell one of his Scottish golf courses to Saudi Arabia for an “astronomical” amount of money—far more than the course is actually worth, he said. Pressed on the idea, he quickly demurred and refused to offer further details.
As a real estate mogul, Trump has found other opportunities to work with them. Between his two terms, Trump struck a deal to build a handful of properties in partnership with Dar Global, a Saudi firm that grew out of a major Saudi real estate developer. The company’s CEO attended Trump’s inauguration in January, enthusiastically posting videos and pictures from exclusive events. Since then, the company’s plans with Trump have expanded to include a tower in Dubai, a golf course in Qatar, three resort properties in Oman, two projects in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, and another tower in Jeddah, the gateway city for Islam’s holy city of Mecca.
Ethics experts have roundly condemned Trump’s conflicts of interest in the Middle East—which, to be fair, involve several other countries, not just Saudi Arabia—as anything but appropriate.
Hours before MBS arrived in Washington, the Trump Organization announced its latest project with Dar Global. They plan to build a resort in the ultra-exclusive Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean, using crypto to finance the project.
During Trump’s first term, Saudi operatives murdered and dismembered MBS critic and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. In response, in the midst of global outrage, Trump offered a gentle condemnation.
“This is a bad situation, ” he said at the time, “We can not let this happen to reporters, to anyone.”
On Tuesday, during the Crown Prince’s White House visit, after seven years and many business deals, Trump offered a far less sympathetic view. When reporters asked the president, seated next to MBS, about Khashoggi, his reply was terse.
“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen,” Trump said. He insisted that MBS knew nothing about the murder—a CIA assessment later found it highly likely that MBS actually ordered the killing—and complained that the press was embarrassing a guest.
As unsurprising as Trump’s about-face on Khashoggi was, his denial on Tuesday that there has been anything improper about his own personal and financial relationship with Saudi Arabia, was even more outlandish.
“What my family does is fine. They do business all over,” Trump told reporters. “They’ve done very little with Saudi Arabia actually, I’m sure they could do a lot.”
2025-11-19 04:58:54
In a bombshell decision on Tuesday, a federal court in Texas blocked a new congressional map that was created after President Donald Trump demanded that the state redraw district lines to hand Republicans five new seats.
“Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map,” wrote Jeffrey Brown, a Trump-appointed district court judge. His opinion—backed by David Guaderrama, an Obama appointee and the district’s senior judge—found that Texas’ map violated the 14th and 15th Amendment by discriminating based on race. Judge Jerry E. Smith, a Reagan appointee, filed a dissenting opinion.
The decision is the latest defeat for Trump in the gerrymandering arms race.
The panel’s two-judge majority pointed specifically to a Justice Department letter from early July that claimed that four congressional districts where Black and Latino voters comprised a combined majority were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cited that letter as the rationale when calling a special legislative session that month to redraw its congressional map. “The Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race,” Judge Brown wrote.
Texas Republicans claimed the redistricting effort was motivated by partisan politics, a practice which the Supreme Court has said cannot be reviewed in federal court. But Brown concluded that “the letter instead commands Texas to change four districts for one reason and one reason alone: the racial demographics of the voters who live there.” The judge was unsparing in his criticism of the Justice Department, writing that the letter was “challenging to unpack” given its “many factual, legal, and typographical errors.”
The court concluded that the legislature “dramatically dismantled and left unrecognizable all four districts” targeted by the DOJ. The state ultimately eliminated seven “coalition districts” where two or more minority groups had joined forces to elect their preferred candidates, and turned them into districts where a single race predominated instead.
“It wasn’t enough for the map to merely improve Republican performance,” Brown wrote. “It also needed to convert as many coalition districts to single-race-majority districts as possible. That best explains the House bill’s authors’ comments during the legislative process and the map’s stark racial characteristics. The bill’s main proponents purposefully manipulated the districts’ racial numbers to make the map more palatable. That’s racial gerrymandering.”
Gene Wu, the Democratic leader in Texas’ House of Representatives, hailed the decision, praising the court for stopping “one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen.”
Texas will appeal the decision directly to the Supreme Court, which is already weighing whether to destroy the remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act, whose provisions encourage the creation of districts where minority voters have an opportunity to gain political power. It’s very possible, perhaps even likely, that the Supreme Court will ultimately side with Texas; its justices have given the president king-like power and ruled in favor of Republicans in nearly every major voting dispute.
But for now, the decision on Tuesday is the latest in a string of defeats for Trump in the gerrymandering arms race he started. On November 4, California voters overwhelmingly approved a new map designed to offset the Texas gerrymander and give Democrats five new congressional seats. On November 10, a state judge in Utah ordered a map that creates a new pro-Democratic district. And on November 14, the head of the Indiana state Senate said he would not push forward a map that could have given Republicans a 9-0 advantage there. Taken together, the developments raise the prospect that Democrats could break even in—or even win—a redistricting war that was initiated by Republicans.
