Barton Gellman

On The Briefing with Michael Waldman, Melissa Murray discusses her new book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader. bit.ly/4tsGahv

MIT announces “the number of grad students will be 20 percent less than it was in 2024 — about 500 fewer students”

The Trump administration has thrown American scientific research into chaos, undermining Congress’s power of the purse and jeopardizing the nation’s economic future in the process. We break down the policy changes and their consequences: bit.ly/42ytB9B

Not included in this important NOTUS story, Trump “truthed” support for Palantir in early April—and even included the stock ticker symbol—right after he purchased a ton of Palantir shares in March. Shares jumped about 3% within minutes of the post.

The destruction of 538's data archives is essentially just digital arson. It's an incredible loss of decades of valuable data, for no real reason beyond "we felt like it".

This has barely registered but Trump is turning ICE over to a Private Prison executive whose ex-company holds $1 BILLION in ICE contracts. stuff of scandal not long agao thebulwark.com/p/trump-just-h…

Signal warns it would pull out of Canada if made to comply with lawful access bill theglobeandmail.com/politics/artic…

Read @EggerDC on the utter foulness of the Trump IRS settlement fund. Truly the type of rank corruption we have not really witnessed before. Plundering at its finest

Yikes. And there's inaugurating this violent tech in *schools*?

At a time of war in the Middle East, the US has no ambassador in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Iraq or Kuwait. At a time of war in Europe, there is no US ambassador in Russia or Ukraine. Altogether some 115 of 195 ambassador posts are vacant. @RobbieGramer wsj.com/politics/polic…

ABC News has now taken all FiveThirtyEight articles completely offline. They now redirect to abcnews dot com/politics. A needless erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge.

APPLEBAUM: Russia's war in Ukraine is sometimes described, including recently by American Vice President, as if it were nothing more than territorial dispute, kind of scuffle over lines on map. But when Russia denies that Ukraine is a real nation, builds concentration camps on Ukrainian territory, bans Ukrainian language and systematically arrests mayors, teachers, journalists, and priests, then Russia is also attacking Europe that was built after 1945, Europe whose borders are not supposed to be changed by force. Russia invaded Ukraine not only to destroy Ukraine but also to prove that treaties are meaningless, alliances are weak, and brute force still decides fate of nations. By waging imperial war of conquest, Russia seeks to undermine Europe's post-imperial order.

"Supreme Court has frequently admonished judges not to interfere in election cases when the process is already underway, but it is now being accused of doing exactly that in recent decisions favoring Republicans in redistricting fights." @lawrencehurley: nbcnews.com/politics/supre…

Thanks to my brilliant colleagues, a way to visualize and better understand the American situation. "The Trump Administration’s Use of State Power Against Media: Keeping Track of the Big Picture" By Professor @bechamilton link: justsecurity.org/112792/trump-a…

Donald Trump is about to turn Jan 6 criminals into MILLIONAIRES. With your tax dollars. The people who smeared feces on the Capitol walls… …hunted Mike Pence through the halls of Congress… …assaulted cops. He’s creating a $1.7 billion apology fund for them. Disgusting.

Let me get this straight. Trump sued his own IRS for $10 billion. His own Justice Department is now considering settling that case. And one of the terms on the table is that the IRS drops all audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses PERMANENTLY. He’s using the full weight of the federal government to protect himself and his family from accountability and potentially pay himself BILLIONS of your tax dollars. nytimes.com/2026/05/12/bus…

Congress must ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, in red states and blue states alike. bit.ly/4wr2Pxn

This video on the rise of Russ Vought is based on scores of interviews, thousands of pages of emails and dozens of hours of videos and recordings of private briefings given by Vought, most of which have not been previously reported. propublica.org/article/video-…

Barack Obama is the only president in American history born after Grover Cleveland's widow died.

One of the VERY FIRST things done after the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was to have the text of the new Constitution translated into Dutch and German, which were at the time the two largest non-English language spoken in the United States. Here's the National Archives: