Happy Thursday! The Morning Dispatch’s new British editor knows nothing about American college football but might become a fan just because of how fun this year’s player names are. TMD is particularly fond of Dude Person, Pig Cage, Memorable Factor, and King Large, with Evan Hand highlighting some more great options.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- Israel officially approved a significant construction project in the West Bank on Wednesday, greenlighting plans to build 3,400 new housing units in the E1 area, located between Jerusalem and the West Bank Israeli city, Ma’ale Adumim. Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said formal approval is a “significant step that practically erases the two-state delusion,” and added that “every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea.” While prior U.S. presidential administrations have opposed plans for further Israeli development in the E1 zone, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said in a Wednesday radio interview that the decision is “for the government of Israel to make.”
- President Donald Trump called for the resignation of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook in a Truth Social post on Wednesday, citing mortgage fraud allegations that Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte raised last week. “Cook must resign, now!!!” the president wrote. On August 15, Pulte issued a criminal referral to Attorney General Pam Bondi, claiming Cook falsified her primary residency status in mortgage documents to “potentially secure lower interest rates and more favorable loan terms.” Cook, whom former President Joe Biden appointed as one of the seven Fed governors in May 2022, responded to Trump’s post in a statement on Wednesday: “I have no intention of being bullied to step down from my position because of some questions raised in a tweet.” She said she is preparing to answer “any legitimate questions” raised about her financial and mortgage history.
- A federal judge on Wednesday denied the Justice Department (DOJ)’s request to unseal grand jury transcripts and related documents of the trial of deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—the third ruling from a judge blocking its release. U.S. District Judge Richard Berman ruled the DOJ failed to adequately identify “special circumstances” that are required to unseal the testimony materials, adding its release would prompt “possible threats to victims’ safety and privacy.” Berman also downplayed the significance of its contents. “The grand jury testimony is merely a hearsay snippet of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged conduct,” he wrote. “The Government’s 100,000 pages of Epstein files and materials dwarf the 70 odd pages of Epstein grand jury materials.”
- U.S. District Judge Fred Biery issued a preliminary injunction on Wednesday temporarily blocking a Texas law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in all public school classrooms, effective September 1. Several families, representing a variety of religious faiths, filed a lawsuit in June against Texas’s Alamo Heights Independent School District, contending the state law violated the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. “Even though the Ten Commandments would not be affirmatively taught, the captive audience of students likely would have questions, which teachers would feel compelled to answer,” Biery wrote. Federal courts have also temporarily barred similar laws passed this year in Arkansas and Louisiana, and the issue is expected to eventually be litigated before the U.S. Supreme Court.
- New York City Mayor Eric Adams suspended a longtime close adviser and fundraiser, Winnie Greco, from his mayoral re-election campaign after she reportedly attempted to bribe a reporter for The City by handing her a potato chip bag containing cash, including at least one $100 bill and several $20 bills. When the journalist, Katie Honan, later discovered the cash, she attempted to contact Greco to return it, but was unable to reach her. Greco later told The City she made “a mistake,” while her attorney maintained her “intent was purely innocent.” A spokesman for the Adams campaign said the mayor had “no prior knowledge” of the incident.
- The Texas House approved its controversial redrawn congressional maps on Wednesday, which are intended to give Republicans five more winnable seats in the U.S. House of Representatives ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The maps must still be approved by the GOP-controlled state Senate and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott before becoming official. In turn, California Democrats have introduced their own redistricting maps, which will be voted on in a state special election on November 4, and are designed to secure five additional Democratic seats, countering the Texas effort. To learn more about the redistricting fight, read the August 14 TMD.
On Guard
A new sight welcomes tourists and Acela commuters to Union Station in Washington, D.C. Two armored Humvees and a pair of towering L-ATVs (light combat tactical all-terrain vehicles) greet travelers emerging from the station entrances on Columbus Circle. Small groups of military police from D.C.’s National Guard—without guns but carrying truncheons and plastic zip ties—stand in front of them, while curious tourists, news anchors, and the occasional protester mill around.
This is the (very) new normal in the nation’s capital, as President Donald Trump’s surge of federal law enforcement, D.C. National Guard, and state National Guard troops continues apace.
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On August 11, Trump signed a pair of executive orders giving the White House control of city police forces and mobilizing the National Guard to address what Trump characterized as a crime “emergency.” In the days following, roughly 800 members of D.C.’s National Guard and 500 federal law enforcement officers from various agencies took to the district’s streets, bolstered by small contingents of National Guard from Ohio, West Virginia, and South Carolina. More troops from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana are reportedly on the way. Much of the Guard deployment is of dubious legality, observers say, and won’t fix the structural issues with D.C. policing. But it’s also likely to have at least a short-term impact on the city’s relatively high crime rate.
The federal deployment to D.C. can be split into three broad categories: troops activated from the capital’s own National Guard, various state contingents under the command of their respective governors, and federal law enforcement personnel, including officers from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Marshals, and the Secret Service.
Critics say federal personnel are focused on highly visible actions in low-crime areas—not the the areas local residents encounter the most crime—but the White House has countered that 101 out of 212 non-immigration-related arrests made between August 9 and 17 were in wards 7 and 8 (two of the city’s violent hotspots across the Anacostia River.) On Wednesday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said federal law enforcement had so far made more than 550 arrests in total, at least 300 of which were related to immigration enforcement.
Even so, it’s indisputable that National Guard troops are essentially absent from the most dangerous neighborhoods. Instead, they are positioned in a shallow arc across southwest D.C., in tourist-heavy areas like the National Mall, Union Station, and Metro stops around the city.
Federal law enforcement officers also operate in these areas, but they have been scattered across the city, in both high and low crime areas. DEA and ICE officials have patrolled the gentrified Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan neighborhoods, FBI agents recently patrolled Georgetown, ICE and U.S. marshals conducted operations in the less-safe neighborhood of Columbia Heights, and Secret Service and Border Patrol agents made arrests in D.C.’s Northeast, a relatively high-crime area. In the quiet residential neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, a masked ICE agent tore down a poster with obscene anti-ICE slogans, telling a videotaping onlooker, “We’re taking America back, baby.” The video was posted to ICE’s official account on Sunday.
Guard soldiers were considerably less gung-ho. TMD spoke with nine soldiers, who all shied away from expressing opinions on their current mission and stressed their supportive role. “We can’t arrest or anything like that,” a D.C. Air Guard member told TMD outside the Pierre L’enfant Metro entrance. “We’re here to support law enforcement and just back them up.”
But he did say his unit had been trained in “basic apprehension and de-escalation” techniques, and he mentioned members of his unit had temporarily detained someone who had assaulted a police officer on the National Mall. That sort of incident appears to be relatively rare: TMD could not find any Guard members who had personally assisted D.C. police.
The Guard’s limited range of action is due to relatively strict legal constraints. “Their initial mission is to provide a visible presence in key public areas, serving as a visible crime deterrent,” the Army said in a statement last week. “They will not arrest, search, or direct law enforcement.”
With these parameters, the National Guard is on fairly solid legal footing, Mark Nevitt, a professor at Emory University School of Law and a former Navy JAG, told TMD. Protecting federal property and employees “would be consistent with existing legal authorities,” he said.
With almost a quarter of Washington’s land owned by the federal government, concentrated around downtown government buildings and the National Mall, Guard members have a lot of freedom of movement, he noted. But anything beyond that is “a thornier question,” Nevitt said. The D.C. National Guard isn’t subject to the Insurrection Act—the law that allows presidents to federalize state Guard troops for law enforcement purposes—as they’re already directly under Trump’s authority.
“It’s sort of an end-around the Insurrection Act,” said Nevitt. But he also said it’s an “open legal question” as to whether the Posse Comitatus Act, which criminalizes the use of the military for law enforcement in the absence of the Insurrection Act being invoked, or in certain specific support roles, applies to D.C.’s Guard. If D.C. Guard troops actively assisted federal or local law enforcement, there’s simply no judicial precedent, outside of a few opinions from the Department of Justice, for dealing with the situation.
For the state Guard contingents beginning to arrive in Washington, the situation is even less clear. “They haven’t been deputized under D.C. law to arrest,” said Nevitt, although he noted that the use of state Guards to enforce the law in the absence of the Insurrection Act would likely be criminal.
But legal complications are separate from the Guard’s effectiveness at deterring crime. “I would expect to see some effect,” Peter Moskos, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former police officer, told TMD. He pointed to evidence from rapid large-scale deployments of federal personnel to D.C. during terror alerts in the early 2000s, creating a noticeable drop in crime.
The effect, said Moskos, is twofold. First, Guard troops performing relatively simple duties like standing by Metro stops free up D.C. police for more proactive missions. The mere presence of uniformed personnel can also deter crime, simply by fostering a sense that the government is focused on law enforcement.
Several hundred more law enforcement personnel patrolling the streets will likely intimidate criminals. Beyond this, Rafael Mangual—an expert on crime and policing at the Manhattan Institute—told TMD that incarcerating criminals who are likely to reoffend could reduce street crime for years. “Even [getting] a few hundred gun-toting criminals off the street, for a multiyear prison term, can yield significant benefits of public safety over time,” he noted.
The question, both Mangual and Moskos said, is whether U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro and the Metropolitan Police Department can translate this relief into sustainable long-term gain. Metropolitan Police staffing levels are currently at a 50-year low, and coordination between D.C. police and the U.S. attorney’s office and criminal justice system remains difficult.
“It is a good way to get things under control in the places where these officers are being deployed,” Mangual said. “But when they leave, D.C. is still going to need to have an answer for the things that have been driving crime over the long term.”
Today’s Must-Read
The Next Generation of Wokeness
Toeing the Company Line
No, ‘the Economists’ Didn’t Botch Trump’s Tariffs
How a Pardon for Binance’s Founder Would Break Presidential Norms
Newsom Targets Trump as Redistricting Fight Takes Shape
Are Age Verification Laws Constitutional?
When Harry Became Sally | Interview: Carole Hooven
Worth Your Time
Universities have long had a large foreign student body, and the consensus view is that this has been beneficial both to the institutions—which can charge higher fees—and for America—which can take the best talent from other countries. But former U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, current head of defense for Palantir, argues in the Wall Street Journal that there are “corrupt and immoral links between universities like Harvard and the Chinese Communist Party,” and the White House should move aggressively to curb the number of Chinese nationals enrolling at American universities: “Mr. Trump noted this summer that ‘the United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence,’ which Joe Biden called ‘a defining technology of our era.’ Universities help drive that race. Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, has argued that the rate of AI progress may be such that ‘you need to prevent all of our secrets from going over to our adversaries and you need to lock down the labs.’ Thousands of Chinese citizens are working and studying in such labs. The U.S. hosted 1.1 million international students last year. Of those, 25% came from China. In 2022 foreign nationals (many of them Chinese) accounted for almost 40% of science doctorates. In AI specifically, nearly 40% of top-tier researchers at U.S. institutions are of Chinese origin.” He continues: “Blindly embracing academic cooperation with a geopolitical rival is absurd. Nobody suggests we should train Iranian nuclear physicists or Russian ballistics engineers. The U.S. wouldn’t have been better off collaborating more with Nazi Germany in the 1930s or with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Why make an exception for a nation dedicated to surpassing the U.S. in emerging technologies?”
Presented Without Comment
New York Times: New Details Emerge on Fox Hosts’ Efforts to Bolster Trump in 2020
Several of Fox News’s most prominent on-air news personalities made clear their desire to help Mr. Trump shortly before and after the 2020 presidential election, according to a tranche of court documents released on Tuesday in a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox Corporation filed by Smartmatic, a voting technology company.
In one text message, Mr. Watters, who now hosts “Jesse Watters Primetime” on Fox News, said to his colleague Greg Gutfeld: “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL,” a reference to the movement trying to overturn the results of the election.
Ms. Pirro, a former Fox News host who is now the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., told Ronna McDaniel, then the Republican National Committee chair, in a text in the months before the election: “I work so hard for the President and party.” Ms. Pirro had been pushing for a pardon from Mr. Trump for her ex-husband, Smartmatic argues.
Ms. Bartiromo, a host on Fox Business and Fox News, texted Rudolph W. Giuliani, then a personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, about the election results on Nov. 12, 2020: “I want you to overturn this.”
Also Presented Without Comment
The Guardian: Washington DC Restaurants Suffer Sharp Drop in Diners Since Trump Crackdown
Also Also Presented Without Comment
The Independent: Trump Hopes He Can Get Into Heaven and Believes Solving Ukraine War Will Get Him There
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