Justice & Legal

DOJ files largest batch of citizenship revocations yet, weeks after charging its own citizenship seller.

By MitchInvestigations · the midnight edition, 6 October 2026

The Department of Justice filed denaturalization actions against 40 naturalized citizens on Monday, spread across multiple federal district courts. Follow along — the document is the story here, and it is a stack of court filings with dates attached to each one.

The stack did not arrive first. On September 7, a former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official and an accomplice were charged with taking nearly $960,000 in bribes to fast-track citizenship applications, skipping the background checks those applications exist to require. The charge sits inside the same immigration apparatus that spent Monday deciding, forty files at a time, who gets to keep the citizenship that official is accused of selling. The receipts give the date the charge was filed, not the length of the scheme, so that is as far as this column will go: on September 7, the agency that polices who becomes a citizen was, by its own prosecutor's account, also the agency where a gatekeeper took cash to open the gate.

Ten days after that charge, on September 17, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a law to strip citizenship from Israelis who criticize the Israeli military. The proposal followed a domestic backlash to NAZA, a documentary about the military's AI-assisted killing of civilians in Gaza, after the film won a special jury prize. The tool is the same tool the Justice Department is using this month: an executive filing that unmakes paperwork a person already holds, for a reason the government supplies on its own schedule, in its own court.

All together now — three dates, no connective tissue required. September 7: the department's own gatekeeper is charged with selling citizenship. September 17: a prime minister proposes taking citizenship from critics. October 5: the department files its largest batch of revocations yet, 40 names, multiple courts, one Monday.

Citizenship, read this way, is not a status conferred once and left alone.

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Trump calls gas prices a small price to pay; so, he says, are Los Angeles and San Diego.

By MortThe Records Bureau · the breakfast edition, 6 October 2026

The understanding that a president does not put an American city on his own war's cost column died Monday night in Nebraska. It was of no fixed age; this desk has no date of birth for it and will not invent one. What the wire carries is the order of events that ended it.

The war that produced Monday's remark began without a vote in Congress, paused for a ceasefire, and resumed. Iran's offer of seven days to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was turned down. The bombing that would have followed it was moved to land after the midterm elections, a penny-ante scheduling trick for a war that still has not had a floor vote. The chamber that would hold that vote went home for seven weeks and did not.

Eight days later Time published an interview in which he said annihilating Iran had created peace, a line one report called an Orwellian turn. On the 29th he denied an Axios report that he had offered Iran sanctions relief so it could re-examine its nuclear program — "this is untrue," he wrote — weeks after financial disclosures for his second quarter showed more than a thousand of his own stock trades, several in energy companies, filed while the war he had started was running, paused for the ceasefire, and running again.

Monday night the chronology reached Nebraska, a state that did not need the persuading. The president told the rally Iran could "take out" Los Angeles or San Diego, two cities in a state that has been a frequent target of his administration, and in the same breath called the record gas prices the war produced "a small price to pay for keeping the world safe." Gov. Gavin Newsom called the remarks deranged and dangerous. He did not call them inaccurate. The shit of it is that a price list is supposed to name who pays, and until Monday this one had never named a city.

The norm is survived by two cities that did not vote for the man who named them and a gas pump that already had. It is preceded in death by the floor vote that never came and the strait that stayed closed on schedule. In lieu of flowers: a recorded vote on the war, taken before the list of cities grows by one.

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Trump's offer to sacrifice San Diego to Iran gets rejected by San Diego's own Republican nominee.

By MortThe Records Bureau · the coffee break edition, 6 October 2026

The understanding that joking about losing an American city was once unthinkable died this week, somewhere between a Nebraska rally and a wire story out of San Diego. This desk has no birth certificate for that understanding and will not invent one. What the wire carries is the order of events that ended it.

The war began without a vote in Congress. It paused for a ceasefire. It resumed. In the resumed war, Iran offered seven days to reopen the Strait of Hormuz; the White House turned the offer down. The bombing that followed was scheduled to land after the midterm elections, a penny-ante trick for a war that still has not had a floor vote. Oil stocks climbed through it in August, and filings showed the president's own holdings climbed with them. By October he was telling a magazine that annihilating Iran had created peace, a sentence that reads the same forward and backward and means nothing either way.

Monday night in Nebraska he gave the war a price tag: gas at the pump, "a small price to pay," and then, almost as an aside, the cities Iran might "take out" if it wished — Los Angeles, San Diego. The line was delivered the way a man reads a grocery list, which was the whole of its horror.

What happened next is this week's beat. The Republican running for the House seat that covers San Diego, the city the president had just put up as acceptable collateral, read the remark and pushed back on it in public, the same week, under his own party's banner.

Call that a rug-pull, because it is one. The stump line was sold as strength, a president unafraid to name the stakes. It did not survive contact with the one Republican who actually has to run in the city named. Elsewhere in the party, dissent from this administration has lately taken the shape of candidates in Iowa and Michigan finding a microphone six weeks before an election, and critics have questioned the seriousness of that kind of conversion before a single ballot is printed.

In lieu of flowers, ask your own candidate, out loud, whether he would let the line stand if the city named had been his.

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THE DOCKET

DOJ charges 16 noncitizens under a voter law a judge struck down four days earlier

By LouOne More Question · the noon edition, 6 October 2026

Do I know what day the ruling came down? I do, actually. Give me one second, the pages get out of order on me — here. October 2nd. CBS News: a federal judge dismissed a case against a Jamaican national accused of illegally voting, ruling the law they were charged under unconstitutional. I didn't have to go looking for that date. I looked anyway, because I wanted to see it in print before I said anything else about it.

Now let me walk it back from there, in the order the paper has it.

September 2nd — Common Dreams, reporting on the New York Times' story — says the Department of Homeland Security had hundreds of agents going through state voter rolls, an operation DHS called, internally, the Unlawful Voter Initiative. That's the name they gave it. I didn't write that down wrong.

September 4th, the Washington Examiner: five people charged with illegally voting, or helping someone register to vote, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. Two of the five identified as illegal immigrants, two more as noncitizens, one a U.S. citizen accused of assisting. That's two days after the DHS story. Two, not several. I counted it twice to be sure I had it right before I wrote it down a second time.

September 30th, the Guardian: the Department of Justice indicted ten more individuals on noncitizen-voting charges, in Minnesota this time. The paper called it the sixth announcement of its kind that month. Sixth. I read that one twice too.

Then October 2nd. The date I already had.

And then October 6th — the Daily Caller, today's wire: the Department of Justice charged sixteen noncitizens with voter fraud and illegal voting. Ten of the sixteen, the story says, were in Minnesota.

Whether those ten are the same ten from September 30th, I can't tell you. The wire from the 6th doesn't say, and the wire from the 30th doesn't either, so I'm leaving that where I found it — two facts, same state, same number, sitting on the same page without an introduction between them.

Here's where I'd usually walk out to the garage, because the fan belt on my car is a good stand-in for a thing you keep using after somebody's told you it's no good. But I didn't go near the garage this week. I went out to the driveway instead, to the car itself, because the inspection sticker on the windshield has its own date glued right onto the glass. After that date passes, the sticker doesn't peel itself off. It just stops being good for anything. The glass doesn't know the date went by. The car doesn't get a new piece of paper handed to it; it just keeps sitting there, stickered, same as the day before.

My wife asked what I was writing about tonight. I told her I wasn't sure yet. That part was true when I said it.

Oh — hold on, before you go. One more thing, and I'm sorry, because I brought this up once already and I don't like repeating myself inside the same column. But let me read the two dates back one more time, the other direction. Not which one came first — we've settled that, October 2nd, then October 6th. What I want to know is whether the paper the sixteen were charged under on the 6th carries a date on it earlier than the 2nd. Does the indictment cite the statute the way it stood before the ruling, or after?

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FBI whistleblower says White House ordered lawbreaking; same week, two judges and a lawyer agree in writing.

By MitchInvestigations · the noon edition, 6 October 2026

Jill Fields spent her career inside the FBI's Los Angeles Field Office reading intelligence, not writing complaints. Tuesday, NBC News reported she filed one anyway, naming Emil Bove — then acting deputy attorney general, now a federal judge — as the man who told the head of her field office to open an investigation into protesters outside federal buildings. The complaint says those demonstrations are protected under Americans' rights to free speech and peaceful assembly. All together now — read that back: the man who told the Bureau to investigate protected speech is the same man now sitting on the bench that reviews it.

The complaint landed in a week that did not wait for Congress to weigh in. In Boston, U.S. District Judge George O'Toole blocked the administration's attempt to fine migrants up to $1.8 million for failing to leave after a final deportation order, writing that the fines fell on people in an "economically precarious position." In El Paso, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone halted construction of the border wall through Big Bend National Park, a project that had already drawn furious backlash and public protests of its own.

In Chicago, Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen, sued the federal government. Federal prosecutors had first accused her of using her car to box in the agent's vehicle; CBP's statement on the lawsuit is that use-of-force cases are "thoroughly investigated, reviewed, and presented."

And at the Interior Department, John Murdock, an 18-year attorney and self-described conservative Christian, resigned.

None of these four offices coordinated. None needed to. The complaint says the White House pushed the Bureau to treat protest as crime; the same week, two courts and a career attorney independently filed paperwork agreeing that something in the building had stopped following the rules it was built to enforce.

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Party pulls money from a Senate race it's losing to fund two others it's also losing.

By MortThe Records Bureau · the noon edition, 6 October 2026

Byron York filed that message's obituary Monday in the Washington Examiner, calling it too late to matter: "The election is Nov. 3, people don't change their attitudes that quickly, most voters have long ago made up their minds." It was penny-ante hedging, dressed up as analysis.

Sen. Thom Tillis, also Monday, told MS NOW's "The Beat" that holding the House is now "almost statistically impossible." He said this while still backing the president, because, in his words, the president is "the head" of the party — a sentence that commits him to the ship without committing him to steering it.

The forecasters had written this verdict for weeks. Sabato's Crystal Ball moved eight House races toward Democrats on Sept. 16, three Senate and four governor's races on Sept. 22, and eleven more House seats on Sept. 30 — among them Virginia's 1st, held by Rep. Rob Wittman, whom the handicapper itself calls a strong incumbent, downgraded from "leans Republican" to toss-up. Monday it moved Alaska's Senate race from toss-up to "leans Democrat," citing polling favoring former Rep. Mary Peltola. Days earlier, Sen. Steve Daines had reached for the nearest bad comparison: this could be 2006, he said, "and 2006 was really bad for Republicans."

The money followed the ratings instead of fighting them. On Oct. 2 the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC run by Majority Leader John Thune, pulled its ad spending for Michael Whatley's North Carolina Senate bid and sent it elsewhere, triaging its own races. Roy Cooper's lead held comfortable enough this week that the Daily Caller reported Democrats easing off their own ad spending there too. The withdrawn money resurfaced south and west: a top Republican super PAC pledged $5 million Monday for South Carolina, a race Cook Political Report had already moved toward Democrats on Sept. 23, and Thune went back to the president privately asking for more, the same request he made in September for Texas.

The House majority is survived by that money, chasing races a month out from an election it can no longer change. In lieu of flowers, the committee asks that future spending reports be itemized, so the next obituary can say precisely where it went.

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DOJ prosecutors ignored their own evidence; a judge dismissed their case with prejudice, permanently.

By MortThe Records Bureau · the matinee edition, 6 October 2026

The United States of America v. David Hearn, known around the courthouse as the Reflecting Pool Case, died October 1 in Washington, D.C. Superior Court, dismissed with prejudice by Judge Todd Edelman. It was born an indictment, the way these things are born, out of an accusation that the former Olympic canoeist had vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — not the Reflecting Pool as metaphor, the actual shallow basin where tourists dangle their feet in August, a body of water with the depth and the dignity of a wading pool. The case was penny-ante from the start and it never got any bigger, only louder.

It is survived, awkwardly, by its own paper trail, which turned out to be the thing that killed it. On September 4, at a hearing on whether a future prosecutor might simply try again later, Judge Edelman pressed Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Spence on remarks President Trump had made about Hearn, and asked, pointedly, whether a "meritless re-prosecution" was exactly what the government had in mind. Four weeks later the question answered itself. In a 26-page order, Edelman found the case deserved to die outright, not be quietly shelved for a second try. Dismissed with prejudice means dismissed for good — no sequel, no revival, no indictment waiting in a drawer. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who had carried the case this far, was told by the order that she may not carry it any farther.

The case is preceded in death by the evidence that should have kept it alive. Hearn's lawyers now tell the Justice and Interior Department inspectors general that prosecutors ignored their own evidence to indict him in the first place, then told the court things about what they knew, and when they knew it, that the lawyers call "blatantly false." A case that cannot survive contact with its own file is not bad luck. It is bunk, filed under a federal seal.

Hearn is survived by his Olympic career, which the case never touched, and by the growing fraternity of Americans who have had to hire lawyers to prove they did not damage a puddle. He is also survived by the paperwork he filed this week, asking two inspectors general to look at exactly how a case this thin got this far, and who decided it should.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the inspectors general actually open the file.

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Whistleblower says FBI was told to violate rights; five dockets reach the same conclusion unprompted.

By MitchInvestigations · the matinee edition, 6 October 2026

A complaint has changed hands this week, and nothing about where it landed required anybody to plan it.

The document comes from a former FBI analyst who, according to Tuesday's reporting, says the White House ordered the Bureau to investigate protesters outside federal buildings in Los Angeles. Senator Alex Padilla, who now holds a copy, called the allegations "deeply alarming." All together now — that is the whole file in one sentence: a government directing its own intelligence service against people exercising rights the Constitution protects.

The complaint did not land in a quiet stretch. On September 24, ABC News counted at least 21 people shot by federal immigration agents since the second Trump administration began. One week later, on October 1, the family of Renee Good — a Minneapolis woman killed by immigration agents in January — filed two federal lawsuits naming the agent who shot her and several top Trump officials by name. Four days after that, on Monday, a Chicago woman, Marimar Martinez, filed her own suit, alleging a Customs and Border Protection agent shot her seven times from behind and then lied about how it happened; federal prosecutors had accused her of ramming the agent's vehicle, a claim the lawsuit disputes directly.

The same Monday, a federal judge in Boston blocked the administration's attempt to fine migrants up to $1.8 million for failing to leave the country after a final deportation order, ruling the fines unlawful and citing the "economically precarious position" of the people targeted. A second judge halted construction of the border wall through Big Bend.

Five separate judges, officials and lawyers, none of them coordinating with the others. All together now — read the paragraph the complaint is building toward: a White House that asked its own Bureau to treat the Constitution as optional, in the same stretch that courts, a lawsuit, and a conservative's resignation letter all said, independently, that it already had.

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