r/WhatTrumpHasDone

The Trump administration announced plans Tuesday to repeal a decadeslong ban on road-building and logging across nearly 45 million acres of untouched national woods.

The Department of Agriculture publicly targeted the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule on Tuesday, a Clinton-era regulation also known as the “roadless rule,” calling its limits on backcountry road infrastructure and logging projects outdated and overly restrictive.

In particular, the department accused the rule of limiting protections against growing wildfire risks. Roads can act as firebreaks and allow firefighters to reach ongoing flames more easily.

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a press release. “Today, we filed a proposal to restore authority to local forest managers who know the land best, removing the barriers that have kept them from doing the work the land demands.”

The department’s claims have drawn intense scrutiny from environmental organizations, however, which say the roadless rule has protected the country’s old-growth forests for more than 25 years by keeping human activity out of largely undisturbed woodlands.

“The administration is selling this as a wildfire solution, but it’s the last thing they’d do if they cared about protecting communities from fire,” Garett Rose, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said. “The Forest Service’s own data shows 9 out of 10 wildfires are human-caused and roughly four times more likely to start near a road.”

Sierra Club forest campaign manager Alex Craven also took aim at the department’s claims, noting the roadless rule already allows for wildfire mitigations, such as the removal of fuel ladders like brush and debris.

“The administration’s attempt to blame the roadless rule for worsening wildfire risks ignores both the facts and the rule itself,” Craven said in a statement. “Roads generally lead to more ignitions and result in more wildfires — not fewer. And the roadless rule has always allowed for targeted actions to reduce hazardous fuels.”

Craven continued, accusing the Trump administration of using proffered environmental concerns as a mask for ulterior motives:

“What it does not allow is using wildfire as an excuse to open some of America’s most intact public forests to industrial exploitation and new road construction,” he added. “Americans want and deserve forests managed for clean water, wildlife, recreation, and climate resilience — not another giveaway to extractive industries.”

If successful, eliminating the roadless rule would open 44.7 million acres of national forest land across 37 states and Puerto Rico to road construction and commercial resource extraction. This includes swaths of Tongass National Forest in Alaska, Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California, Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina and Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania.

Roadless forests in Idaho and Colorado would remain protected due to superseding state laws.

Seventy-six percent of Americans support the roadless rule, with strong support among Democrats, Republicans and independents, according to a Susquehanna Polling and Research poll conducted in February.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday is traveling to Iowa in his “personal capacity,” the Pentagon said in a statement, further fueling speculation that the former Fox News personality is mulling a run for president at some point.

The visit, reported earlier by CBS News, comes five months after Hegseth was scheduled to appear at a political rally and fundraising event with Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), who is running for reelection this year. That trip was postponed after several U.S. troops from Iowa were killed early in the war with Iran.

In response to questions, the Pentagon said in a statement that it does “not proactively announce events” that Hegseth attends “in his personal capacity.”

Hegseth will take a U.S.-funded military aircraft to Iowa, the Pentagon said. He is doing so because he is “designated as a ‘required use’ traveler” by the U.S. government “and is mandated to use military aircraft for all travel, both official and unofficial, due to the continuous need for secure communications and responsive transportation for national security.”

Officials familiar with Hegseth’s thinking believe that he is considering a run for president or some other political office after his time in the Trump administration is over. The travel to Iowa, a presidential campaign proving ground, fits that pattern, one of those officials said Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid.

Nathanial Rai had been swept off his feet along the California coast, was rescued by a 16-year-old lifeguard – and was now sitting in the Oval Office with Donald Trump.

Of the rescuer, Ryder Williams, Trump said to Rai: “He’s a real hero. I don’t know if I’d do it.

“I wouldn’t, probably. You’re lucky I wasn’t on the service that day.”

Rai, 10, wore a dark suit and maroon tie and sat on a gold couch aside his father and Trump. Across from Rai was Williams, and both watched Trump speak of their ordeal, a video of which went viral.

Trump met the lifeguard and Rai after saying the teen deserved a civilian honor. Trump previously said on social media that he also would be inviting Williams to the White House to reward his bravery.

Dramatic video of the rescue went viral in late July. It showed Williams clinging to Nathaniel Rai as pounding waves repeatedly crash over them. The pair disappeared from view and reemerged after several seconds as the wave receded.

A second lifeguard, Aaron Bohnen, was eventually able to help get them both back to shore at Seabright Beach in Santa Cruz.

Trump initially commented on the video in response to a post from his son, Eric Trump, who said Williams deserved “the highest civilian honor”.

Meanwhile, Rai’s father, Sumit, told the Associated Press of Williams: “What he did, I can never repay. I’m forever grateful.”

As NBC Bay Area reported, Williams’s rescue of Rai unfolded as California state lawmakers reviewed proposed legislation that would officially make lifeguards first responders.

The outlet noted that analysts say giving lifeguards first responder status would bring them more professional recognition, support and resources – and could offer them better worker protections and benefits.

NBC Bay Area spoke with some people who could not believe lifeguards were not already first responders. But the outlet also spoke with Santa Cruz state senator, who said such a designation was not straightforward.

“Of course, lifeguards are first responders, but first responders also go through this rigorous training, so you’d have to decide – because in the peace officer standards training you go through eight months of training – so you’d have to decide what’s appropriate here,” NBC Bay Area quoted Laird as saying.

“How does it work? How does it get designated? What training comes with it? Who pays for it?”

Pressed recently on whether he might accept responsibility for the resurgence of measles in the country, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fended off any suggestion that his history of promoting vaccine skepticism might be partly to blame.

The groups facing these outbreaks were “almost all religious communities that just don’t vaccinate,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash.

“It’s hard to blame that on me,” he added.

But what Mr. Kennedy failed to acknowledge is his own role, and the role of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group he once led, in stirring distrust in those very communities. That includes in Lancaster County, Pa., which is now at the center of one of the largest measles outbreaks in the country.

The state has reported dozens of hospitalizations and more than 230 cases, a number some local doctors consider to be a vast underestimate given that local Mennonite and Amish communities tend to avoid traditional health care.

Five years ago, Mr. Kennedy stood behind a wooden lectern on a farm in the county and delivered a warning to the local Amish community about the nation’s public health agencies.

“Those agencies are going to do everything in their power to make the Amish vaccinate,” he said. “Because they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.”

A large crowd — 1,500 people according to a local paper’s account — spilled out from under a white tent at the annual farming fair to hear from Mr. Kennedy, then the leader of Children’s Health Defense. He turned to measles, a disease that was so horrible, he joked, that when he fell ill with it as a child he “had to stay home and watch TV the whole week.” The audience erupted with applause and laughter.

“The cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A,” he added.

Local leaders acknowledged that improving childhood vaccination rates has long been a challenge within the area’s Amish communities, where just a quarter of people have been vaccinated against measles, according to a 2025 estimate.

But they also said the work of anti-vaccine groups, including Mr. Kennedy’s visit with Children’s Health Defense, hadn’t made it any easier.

“All it takes is somebody like that, an anti-vaxxer, to make a personal appearance to a group who already has second thoughts about immunizations,” said Dr. Alan Peterson, a family medicine physician in the county and former medical director of a program that provided free vaccines to children in Lancaster County. “Some of them just say, ‘OK, that’s all I need to know and we’re not going to get our immunizations.’”

Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said that under Mr. Kennedy’s leadership, the agency has mounted an aggressive measles outbreak response which has included investing more than $8.5 million to support affected communities and deploying experts to offer assistance.

She added that the department works “to ensure that all communities — including those who choose not to vaccinate — have access to appropriate medical care, including therapeutics.” Children’s Health Defense did not respond to a request for comment.

To those on the front lines of the Pennsylvania outbreak, Mr. Kennedy’s assessment of the current measles situation was off-base on several counts.

For one, area doctors pointed out that the virus wasn’t only spreading through insular religious groups, as he suggested on CNN, but also those in the broader community. The percentage of children vaccinated against measles has declined in the county — falling to 88 percent of kindergartners in 2025, down from 94 percent in 2019 — as it has in the United States overall.

Several local leaders who work with or are part of the area’s so-called plain communities — a group that includes Amish and Mennonite people, who often refrain from using consumer technology, dress modestly and adopt other lifestyle restrictions — also pushed back against the characterization that they simply refuse vaccines.

There are a variety of attitudes toward vaccines within these communities, though it’s true that vaccination rates tend to be lower. . That is because of cultural skepticism toward secular authorities and because children often do not attend public schools, which require vaccinations, said Cory Anderson, who studies those groups at Penn State University.

But historically, the groups were more willing to accept vaccines when there were strong relationships with local doctors, community outreach and acceptance of the shots by local Amish leaders, said Dr. Jeffrey Martin, a physician at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health.

“The Amish are not a group that simply doesn’t vaccinate,” he added.

Allen Hoover, an Old Order Mennonite, spent nearly two decades leading vaccination efforts as the administrator at Parochial Medical Center, a clinic that mainly serves the county’s plain community. Changing attitudes was a slow process that required gentle encouragement and frequent one-on-one conversations about the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which is highly effective at preventing infection and has an excellent safety record.

Gradually, as families saw children spared from the worst diseases, vaccination rates began to climb, he said. (The Pennsylvania Department of Health does not routinely collect vaccination data broken out by religion.)

“We had gained so much trust,” Mr. Hoover said.

Then the pandemic hit, bringing mask mandates, business closures and restrictions on church gatherings.

“It just really eroded the public trust, particularly in those communities, and really gave a stronger voice to those that were advocating for alternatives to the vaccination,” said Alice Yoder, the executive director of community health at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health during that time.

Dr. Ken Brown, a retired scientist living in Lancaster County, remembered taking out an ad in 2021 to encourage vaccination in The Pennsylvania Busy Beaver, a publication that goes out to tens of thousands of Amish and Mennonite people in the region. Two trusted figures in the community had received their Covid-19 vaccines, he wrote, and “neither had a problem!”

The next month, Pennsylvania Coalition for Informed Consent — a partner organization of Children’s Health Defense’s Pennsylvania chapter — took out an almost identical advertisement captioned: “Vaccines can have unintended consequences.”

Distrust spread quickly from the Covid-19 vaccine to other routine shots.

“I would guess that we lost almost as much as we had gained in 20 years,” Mr. Hoover said.

Mr. Kennedy’s visit hammered home the message that public health officials — and the vaccines they promote — should not be trusted, said Dr. Peterson, the local doctor.

Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted that Mr. Kennedy has a history of promoting vaccine skepticism in vulnerable communities.

He and other public health experts point to Mr. Kennedy’s visit to the Pacific island of Samoa in 2019, where he amplified doubts about the safety of the measles vaccine just a few months before an outbreak that killed more than 80 people. In the midst of a 2017 measles outbreak in Minneapolis within a Somali American community — where vaccination rates had fallen because of fears about autism — Mr. Kennedy visited to “discuss vaccine safety concerns,” according to a Children’s Health Defense post.

Even after Mr. Kennedy stepped away from Children’s Health Defense in 2023, the Pennsylvania chapter continued its outreach to the plain community at the same event he had attended.

The group posted a photo of their table at Family Days on the Farm in 2024, which displayed a poster titled “The Secret to Childhood Health Maybe as Simple As Just Saying No,” above graphs purporting to show better outcomes for unvaccinated children. Another poster advertised Mr. Kennedy’s book “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.”

The group purchased a table at the event again last month, even as measles cases were rapidly increasing.

“That is one of the modus operandi of the anti-vaccine movement,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a prominent vaccine scientist who wrote a book about the rise of anti-science movements. “They try to take insular groups that may already be distrusting of either the federal government or health care and they’ll exploit that.”

As outbreaks rage on in the United States, Mr. Kennedy has offered stronger endorsements of the M.M.R. vaccine on social media and during TV interviews. But the Amish community in Lancaster — which does not use social media or own televisions — are unlikely to have heard that message.

Mr. Hoover said he thought that if Mr. Kennedy were to reach out directly to strongly encourage measles vaccination, it would “actually make a difference,” because of his influence with some community members.

Ms. Hilliard, the H.H.S. spokeswoman, declined to comment on whether Mr. Kennedy would do so, but said that the department’s measles response has involved reinforcing that “M.M.R. vaccination remains the most effective way to prevent measles.”

Public health experts said they thought a visit to Lancaster County was unlikely, given Mr. Kennedy’s track record as health secretary, which has included minimizing measles outbreaks, promoting unproven treatments for the virus and undermining confidence in childhood vaccines.

“Every now and then, Kennedy will be dragged in front of the camera and begrudgingly make some offhand positive comment about the M.M.R. vaccine,” Dr. Hotez said. “But that’s about the best you’re going to get out of him.”

America's employers unexpectedly shed 23,000 jobs in July, while the unemployment ticked down to 4.1%, the government said on Friday.

The report shows the first job decline since February, potentially hinting at bigger cracks in the labor market than previously known.

Economists anticipated a gain of 87,000 jobs in July.

The key factor of the surprising job loss was local education — which shed 50,000 jobs last month alone — a sector that is susceptible to distortions from the seasonal adjustment process.

Job gains were weaker in previous months, according to new revisions. The economy added 20,000 jobs in June, 37,000 less than initially estimated. Gains in May were revised down by 66,000 to 63,000.

The July jobs report lands as many Fed officials have said they are more concerned about the outlook for inflation than the outlook for employment.

Policymakers are watching for signs of labor market cooling — including evidence that AI is contributing to slower hiring — but many say they do not see evidence of the kind of broad-based deterioration in hiring that would outweigh their concerns about inflation.

Futures markets see a Fed rate hike as slightly more likely than not, assigning a 54% probability to a September move, according to CME FedWatch.

"The economy appears to be performing well with the notable exception of inflation .... With the labor market in balance and growth resilient, my primary concern is inflation," Kansas City Fed president Jeff Schmid said in a speech this week.

President Trump has directed the Navy to tear out a complex system for launching jet fighters from its aircraft carriers and instead go back to using steam catapults, a move Navy officials have fought for years and will likely cost billions of dollars.

U.S. officials say Trump signed a national security memorandum Thursday directing the change, which would involve removing the electromagnetic catapult system used by the ships in the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers.

By doing so, Trump is making good on a promise he made almost 10 years ago to go back to the steam system after hearing a sailor praise it while visiting a ship during his first term.

But since Trump said in an interview with Time in 2017 that he told the Navy to go back to “goddamn steam,” top Navy and industry leaders have resisted the move because of the enormous expense to tear out such a complex system that was integral to the design of the Ford class.

The move directs the Navy to redesign the fourth ship in the class—to be named the Doris Miller—and all remaining ships. The first three ships—the Ford, John F. Kennedy and Enterprise—will retain the electromagnetic system.

“They’re not nearly as good, too complex,” Trump said last month at a conference in Pennsylvania, referring to the electromagnetic system.

The memo includes several other directives aimed at improving submarine maintenance and repair and driving foreign investment into the U.S. shipbuilding sector as the Navy tries to increase the size of its fleet.

The order marks Trump’s latest foray into the design and development of major military programs. He inserted himself into negotiations for the Air Force One and the F-35 jet fighter programs, directed design changes to the Constellation-class frigate and championed the creation of Trump-class battleships.

“This decision will result in carriers that are enabled by battle-tested steam and hydraulic systems that are more resilient and robust than the present, more exquisite, follow-on systems,” the White House said in a statement. “It will also reactivate portions of the maritime industrial base that are easier to scale.”

The nuclear-powered USS Gerald R. Ford, the first ship in the class that cost more than $13 billion, experienced numerous issues during its development and construction, most notably with the catapults, arresting gear and elevators inside the ship that carry munitions to the flight deck.

In February, the Navy touted the success of the Ford’s new electromagnetic catapults and advanced arresting gear, saying they allowed the carrier to launch and recover aircraft at a higher rate than its predecessor Nimitz-class ships. Earlier this year it completed a historic 11-month deployment that included operations against Venezuela and supporting the war in Iran.

The USS George H.W. Bush, which entered the Navy’s fleet in 2009, was the last aircraft carrier built with steam catapults. Replacing the electromagnetic catapults with steam will be a complex endeavor that will likely cost billions of dollars, according to Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank.

Internally, the Ford class is much different from the Nimitz. Sections that housed the infrastructure for steam have been reworked or simply don’t exist. Steam on the older Nimitz ships powers not only the aircraft catapults, but also heating and evaporators that produce freshwater and galley equipment, such as kettles. Piping runs throughout the ship, which creates numerous points of failure.

“Electric is more reliable,” Clark said. “If I can turn these components to be electric instead of steam, it eliminates all the steam related mechanical parts.”

The maintenance on the electrical systems is cheaper, he added. There are 500 fewer sailors on the Ford, in part because fewer technicians are needed to work on the ship’s existing steam equipment.

Clark said early data from the Navy shows that the Ford costs about $100 million less a year to operate compared with a Nimitz-class ship.

As of March, nearly 37,000 aircraft had been launched by Ford’s four electromagnetic catapults, according to Navy data.

General Atomics, the company that builds the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System and Advanced Arresting Gear for the Ford class, said the decision to revert to steam “warrants careful reconsideration.” The company was awarded a contract to build the catapults and arresting gear for the Doris Miller in 2023. Its work is nearly 50% complete and “changing course now would introduce significant cost, schedule, and integration risks,” the company said in a statement.

“The decision will have broader implications for carrier readiness, national security, and U.S. technological superiority, potentially creating opportunities for adversaries to close the capability gap,” the company said. “It also comes at a time when strengthening the U.S. supplier industrial base is a national priority, making workforce stability, production capacity, and the ability to sustain critical technologies more important than ever.”

The Doris Miller isn’t expected to enter the fleet until 2034, but the Navy plans to lay its keel this year, according to a Navy document.

China is using electromagnetic catapults in its newest aircraft carriers and France plans to use the system on the Ford in its new carrier.

The memo directs the Pentagon to pursue more direct investments in U.S. shipbuilding. Under the guidelines, a foreign shipbuilder could build up to two ships overseas while at the same time training American workers and investing in U.S. shipyards.

A similar model has been used by the U.S. Coast Guard to build new icebreakers at Finland’s Rauma Marine Constructions. Additional ships will be built in Louisiana by Bollinger Shipyards. Three ships are already under construction and more than $1 billion has been invested in American shipyards.

The memorandum also calls for a new public shipyard “to supercharge submarine repair and restore the American industrial base.” It would be the first new Navy shipyard opened in 83 years, the White House said. It also called for creating a “Component Repair Center,” essentially a submarine spare parts warehouse, that could quickly ship replacements to subs and repair broken parts.

The Navy has been trying to boost submarine production for years with the goal of building two Virginia-class and one Columbia-class sub each year. It recently awarded General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII Newport News Shipbuilding a $76.6 billion deal for nine Virginia-class and five Columbia-class submarines that will be delivered by 2038.

By the time Black History Month arrived to Chesaning Middle School in central Michigan in 2024, the only Black girl in the fifth grade had already endured a string of racial slurs. On the bus, she was called a “monkey,” she said. Students hurled the n-word at her and said her skin was “burnt like a piece of chicken.”

Then, apparently inspired by a February lesson about slavery, a White boy asked her, “Hey slave, where are your tools so you can get back to working?”

School officials told the girl’s mom that they were dealing with the situation, but the harassment continued, the mother and daughter said in an interview. Frustrated and angry, the mother picked up her iPhone one day, searched for “civil rights” and landed on a federal website.

She found a complaint form and filled it out.

“She’s being bullied to where she can’t even focus on schoolwork,” the mother wrote. She detailed racial harassment and said her daughter had been mentally and emotionally scarred. “I have to get my child help.”

Her complaint was forwarded to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, the office responsible for ensuring that students can attend school free of racial harassment and that for decades has investigated discrimination claims in schools across the country. Originally created to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the office pressured Southern schools to dismantle segregation and later was tasked with investigating discrimination in schools based on sex, disability and other factors, in addition to race.

In June 2024, the office launched an investigation of Chesaning Union Schools. By that fall, investigators had documented the allegations of harassment and expressed their concern that the district had failed to properly respond, according to an investigative document obtained by The Washington Post and two people familiar with the situation. In early January 2025, federal officials opened negotiations with the district on an improvement plan that would settle the case.

What happened next marked a break with decades of federal practice. Instead of resolving such investigations, the Trump administration indefinitely froze them, according to eight current and former employees, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about their work publicly. The administration gutted the Office for Civil Rights and prioritized investigations into transgender athletes and other conservative priorities.

More than three dozen investigations were complete, including this one in Michigan, and at the final stage — negotiations that could have required remedies such as training, better accountability systems and, in some cases, compensation for students.

But those agreements were never finalized, school district officials and other people familiar with the matter said. When President Donald Trump’s second term began, there were thousands of pending investigations. In the 18 months since then, the civil rights office has completed only three settlements, known as resolution agreements, involving racial harassment and no agreements regarding sexual harassment or violence, according to the department’s online database. By contrast, in 2024, the office completed 25 resolution agreements related to racial harassment and 47 related to sexual harassment or violence.

The details of pending investigations are typically cloaked in secrecy. But documents and interviews with current and former officials offer a rare look at allegations that are pending inside the agency.

Among them: Black students were called the n-word, “monkey” and other racial slurs. Children from the Middle East were called terrorists. Video of a sexual encounter between students was dropped into a group chat without consent. And a principal was accused of inappropriately touching girls.

Because of the inaction, there have been no federally mandated protections for students, consequences or accountability for the schools involved.

“The Department of Education’s role is literally to ensure that students don’t experience discrimination at school so they can access their education. What you have here is the Department of Education saying, ‘We won’t do that,’” said Michael Pillera, who worked for a decade at the Office for Civil Rights.

In a statement, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey pointed to a backlog of about 19,000 cases inherited from the Biden administration and said that former president Joe Biden had failed students.

“Any implication that there was a purposeful decision to allow important cases to linger is dishonest,” she said in an emailed statement. “We are utilizing every tool at our disposal to resolve the backlog and return common-sense to our schools.”

But several current and former staffers said they were barred from working on certain types of cases. One former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals directed at his new employer, said his office was close to wrapping up two cases of serious racial harassment in the final days of the Biden administration only to see the cases ignored after Trump arrived and changed the office’s priorities.

“There are real people and real lives at the end of these cases,” he said. “There are consequences for people emotionally, educationally. That story has somehow got lost.”

In response to the Michigan case, Erin H. Walz, an attorney for Chesaning Union Schools, said in an email that the district “categorically denies” the alleged harassment as described by The Post but declined to say what was inaccurate, citing student privacy laws.

Mike McGough, Chesaning’s superintendent, expressed frustration with the Office for Civil Rights.

“The diminished capacity of OCR serves neither party,” he said in an interview. “Complainants haven’t been able to get their claims heard. We don’t get to defend ourselves. We would have continued the process and I believe would have reached a fair and equitable resolution.”

Two months after Trump returned to the White House, the Cleveland office overseeing the Chesaning case was closed. Meanwhile, the racial harassment would only grow worse for one Black girl trying to survive middle school.

The inaction on racial and sexual harassment cases stems from two decisions by the Trump administration: It cut the staff at the Office for Civil Rights by more than half and closed seven of 12 regional offices, overwhelming the remaining staff. (Some workers who were terminated returned following litigation.)

The administration also has prioritized investigating other types of cases, such as schools that allow transgender girls to compete on girls’ sports teams, antisemitism on college campuses and colleges that promote race- or gender-based scholarships. Executive orders issued on the day Trump returned to office took aim at diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies that help transgender students.

In 2026, the office reached 31 resolution agreements enforcing Title VI, the federal law that bars discrimination based on race. All of them involved university partnerships with the PhD Project, which sought to recruit Black and Hispanic students to business school. The Education Department said these partnerships discriminated against people of other races.

Meantime, it was virtually impossible to get the go-ahead for the type of racial and sexual harassment cases that once made up some of the agency’s highest-profile work, several current and former employees said.

At the start of the Trump administration, work on all civil rights cases was halted, as is typical with a new administration, they said. But while some work was eventually unfrozen, they said cases that were pending from the Biden administration were not. Although staffers are officially allowed to work on new racial and sexual harassment cases, they need approval from headquarters to proceed with them. And that’s difficult if not impossible to get, partly because there is such a backlog, those people said.

There’s “no point” in working on these racial or sexual harassment cases because they won’t advance, said one of the staffers in the civil rights office who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “My team leader is just like, `No. We’re letting it sit.’”

That’s what happened in eight cases of racial or sexual harassment examined by The Post. Each case has been ignored for the past 18 months, according to people familiar with the cases.

In Ludlow, Massachusetts, a draft letter of findings noted widespread reports of racial harassment at the middle school between 2021 and 2024. White students reportedly called Black students the n-word and “monkeys,” remarked negatively on their hair or skin color and more.

In January 2025, an attorney with the Office for Civil Rights informed Ludlow Public Schools that the agency had concluded that the district failed to appropriately respond to harassment of one student and had concerns about treatment of others, emails obtained from the district through a public records request show. The parties opened negotiations toward a voluntary agreement that would close the case.

The district tentatively agreed to take a range of steps including paying tuition for a student who left the district, conducting mandatory trainings for all district employees on racial discrimination law and retaining a consultant to help the district implement “inclusive policies and procedures.”

They were close to an agreement on Jan. 21, 2025. Then the government stopped communicating with the district, and the case has been dormant since, people familiar with the case said.

Becky Bouchard, the district’s legal compliance officer, told The Post that Ludlow has taken some steps on its own, including providing guidance and support to students and staff and addressing concerns “as they arise.” She said the district takes all reports of discrimination and harassment seriously, investigates concerns consistent with law and policy and is committed to providing students with a “safe, respectful and inclusive” environment.

There has also been no action since early 2025 in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the civil rights office found that two students of Middle Eastern descent were bullied on the playground, in the hallways and in bathrooms. Other students allegedly called them “camel humpers” and “terrorists,” advised them to “go back to where you’re from” and said “you’re the reason my sister can’t sleep at night,” an investigation document shows.

A spokeswoman for the school system, Mesa County Valley School District 51, said that not all of the allegations are accurate but declined to specify what she believed to be inaccurate, citing laws that protect student privacy. She said the district aims to make decisions based on all available facts and to ensure the process is “fair for everyone involved.”

And at Phoenix Union High School in Arizona, an investigation into racial harassment of a pair of Black siblings showed that the academic performance and mental health of one sibling declined, while the other missed class and felt unable to communicate with teachers as a result. Schools may be in violation of the law if they fail to adequately respond to harassment that is so severe that it denies a student’s ability to benefit from their education. It is unclear whether this case was determined to have reached that level of severity.

Federal officials were negotiating a resolution with the school system in late December 2024 and early January 2025. Then the federal government stopped communicating, a district official said. A spokesman added, “We remain committed to creating welcoming environments that provide respectful treatment” for all.

Stalled sexual harassment cases detailed in documents obtained by The Post include allegations that a student in Arizona climbed over a bathroom wall to record other students, then shared the photos and videos with others; that a principal in Texas touched a student in a way that made her uncomfortable, commented on the attractiveness of cheerleading uniforms, and chest-bumped a cheerleader during a football game; and that a Louisiana college student secretly taped himself having sex with a woman and then shared the video with his fraternity brothers.

In each case, negotiations over resolutions were abruptly curtailed in early 2025 and remain unresolved, according to officials at each school.

Now the future of the Office for Civil Rights is uncertain.

The Trump administration announced in June that it would transfer much of the office’s work to the Justice Department, part of its effort to hollow out the Education Department in hopes of eventually shutting it down. Staffers at the Education Department say they have not been told how investigations will be conducted after the change takes effect.

At the Education Department, the civil rights office is obligated to look into every complaint filed. But at the Justice Department, attorneys pick and choose their cases.

The harassment of the Black girl in Michigan persisted long after the complaint was filed and long after it was shelved, according to the mother and daughter, with mounting educational and emotional consequences.

The mother’s younger siblings had attended Chesaning schools without experiencing harassment, and her older children did not have problems either, she said. It was different for her youngest.

It began in fall 2023, when the girl entered the fifth grade, the mother and daughter said in interviews. Many of the allegations are also detailed in an investigative document, and others allegedly occurred after the civil rights office stopped engaging on the case. The mother spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns that telling her story could impact her job. She is legally the girl’s guardian and also her godmother, and they refer to each other as mother and daughter.

Students harassed the girl all over campus, she said: Sometimes she was insulted on the bus. Sometimes students would push her in the hallways and mutter the n-word under their breath. Once, a classmate told her she could not play with her group on the playground because she was Black. Naturally quiet and shy, she didn’t argue back.

During Black History Month, her class watched a documentary about the civil rights movement. When a protester in the film recounted a racist police officer using the n-word, it seemed to the girl that everyone in class snapped their heads to look at her. The girl asked her teacher for permission to sit in the hallway and begged her mother to let her stay home altogether.

Both said no.

“I scooched down in my chair because I didn’t want to be there,” the girl said in an interview.

She was in line for lunch in the cafeteria when she heard a White boy say “hey slave,” she recalled.

“Go get digging,” he continued, “I need some cotton.”

She felt herself starting to cry. The girl went to see the lunch monitor, who told her to go to the office, where she was asked why she didn’t tell the lunch monitor. The school said it would handle the matter, though the mother said officials would not tell her what punishment the boy received.

McGough, the superintendent, said he could not comment on this specific case due to privacy laws but, in general, cases of persistent harassment are dealt with using significant and progressive discipline.

Over winter and spring 2024, the mother documented her frustration and complaints in a long Facebook post and in emails sent to school and federal officials and reviewed by The Post.

In one example, another student called the girl a “Black monkey.” When called out by a school police officer, he defended himself this way: “I said ‘Black monkey,’ but I didn’t say it to her.’” The officer made him apologize, according to an email her mother sent to the federal official investigating the case.

By fall 2024, the federal investigation was complete. Officials concluded that the district knew about the harassment, according to a draft letter of findings reviewed by The Post.

The evidence “raises compliance concerns that the District did not consistently take prompt and effective steps to determine if the harassing conduct was occurring, remedy its effects, and prevent recurrence,” the letter said.

A proposed resolution agreement was sent to the school district in January 2025. It would have required Chesaning to better track incidents of harassment; train teachers, staff and students about racial harassment; conduct a climate survey to gauge the presence and impact of racial harassment; and provide counseling and tutoring to the girl who was harassed. The agreement also proposed that the district develop a plan so the girl would not be subjected to future harassment.

But the district and the government never reached an agreement, and the attorney working on the case was laid off from the agency.

Walz, the district’s attorney, declined to say whether Chesaning has taken any steps to address school climate.

The harassment continued, and, according to the family, school officials knew it.

Once, the girl reported use of the n-word to officials in the school office, she said, and they asked her whether she thought that was an accurate word to describe her. When the girl said no, a school official replied, “If you don’t think you’re that, why are you coming down here and complaining about it?” she recalled.

“They were trying to put the blame on me,” she said.

In May of this year, the mother found a boxcutter that belonged in the laundry room in her daughter’s room and questioned her about it. The girl confessed that the bullying was too much to handle and that she had considered hurting herself.

A meeting at the school left the mother unsatisfied that things would improve. She began considering other school districts for eighth grade. The girl is still traumatized, her mother said, and is in counseling.

For a time, the mother had felt sure the government would address the harassment. She believes the lawyer working on the case cared. “I could hear it in her voice,” she said.

But it’s been so long since she heard from the lawyer. More than a year since she heard from anyone at the Office for Civil Rights.

She no longer expects them to help.

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice threw in the towel in its attempt to prosecute David Hearn for allegedly vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but the White House is now asking them to try again, according to a new report by The Wall Street Journal.

White House officials are now asking the DOJ to “consider a new prosecution” of Hearn, citing sources “familiar with the discussions,” the Journal reported.

Any attempt to bring new charges “would be highly unusual,” the article noted, because the U.S. Attorney Office for the District of Columbia, headed by Jeanine Pirro, already admitted it had relied on claims from the Department of the Interior that “the damage was caused entirely by vandals, including [Hearn].”

After the indictment, DOI then “provided additional documents” that revealed “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI,” Pirro’s office had said.

DOJ officials were actually “exploring whether another type of case—likely based on misdemeanor allegations—is even possible,” conducting “informal and preliminary” discussions internally, sources told the Journal.

Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, was facing a felony charge for destruction of government property until Pirro’s office filed a motion to dismiss without prejudice at the end of last month.

In addition to dropping the felony charge against Hearn, Pirro’s office moved to dismiss three other misdemeanor cases charging people with similar accusations of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool.

Meanwhile, Trump has continued to rage about the dismissal of the cases, publicly lambasting Pirro and falsely claiming there is “video” evidence of the vandalism being committed.

The president’s attempts to renovate the Reflecting Pool have been a months-long source of frustration for him, as the project has been plagued by bright green algae and peeling paint, which Trump and others in his administration have claimed were caused by vandals. These claims were swiftly met with a high level of skepticism, but Trump’s Department of Justice made several arrests nonetheless, including Hearn.

The current status of the prosecution against Hearn is that the case has been officially dismissed by the court, with the parties set to appear at a hearing next month regarding whether or not the dismissal should be without prejudice, meaning Hearn can legally be charged again, or with prejudice.

In a scathing motion, Hearn’s attorneys sharply denounced the case as a “politically motivated prosecution” of their client that was “motivated by political considerations and devoid of adequate factual support,” and argued that the “risk of harassment and bad faith” was very real, the attorneys continued, because of how Trump and other administration officials had “publicly attacked” the dismissal of the case and the DOJ “has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to seek or reinstate criminal charges to satisfy the President, irrespective of the law or facts.”

Several legal commentators have observed that Pirro and others involved in the case could face disciplinary actions by the DC bar association if it is found that misrepresentations were made to the grand jury or to the court.

President Donald Trump secretly switched planes following assassination threats from Iran—leaving some staff and members of the press as decoys aboard the old Air Force One.

When Trump departed the NATO summit in Turkey last month, he told the press he would skip a ride on his newly renovated Qatari-gifted Air Force One, opting for the original “for old time’s sake.” In reality, top administration officials had hatched an elaborate ruse in the face of a credible assasination threat from Iran, The Washington Post reported Monday night.

After boarding on camera, Trump was quietly rolled off in a catering cart that pulled up to the plane, two U.S. officials told The New York Times. The president made his escape to England in a third military plane, and secretly returned to the original Air Force One after he landed.

Meanwhile, members of the press and some staff members remained on the plane, none the wiser—and evidently vulnerable to attack. While it is standard for the Secret Service to use a decoy in response to threats, in this case, the White House purposefully misled the press to report that Trump was aboard Air Force One, endangering their safety.

Only a few top administration officials were briefed on the plan, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, an official with knowledge of the plan told the Times.

Following a report last month detailing security concerns regarding the new Air Force One, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, hinted that the administration might use subterfuge to aid in the president’s departure from Turkey.

“As the president has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal—including distraction and misdirection—to address those threats,” he said at the time. When the Times asked for new comments about the president’s latest farce, the White House reissued Cheung’s statement without the line on “distraction and misdirection.”

On the ride home from England, reporters asked Trump why they had flown there on the old Air Force One. Trump claimed he wanted soldiers stationed there to see his new plane. When they asked Trump why they’d been asked to keep their window blinds shut, Trump ranted about his dangerous life as the president.

“I’m number one on their list, before you,” the president told the reporters. “But if I go, you go. Right?”

It seems that Trump and his team were sort of hoping it would be the other way around.

An official in the Trump administration’s White House drug office claims that “the number one drug of addiction is weed”—arguing that it is important to “remember the victims of marijuana, the people who’ve died from weed harms.”

Roneet Lev, who serves as the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy’s (ONDCP) chief medical officer, made the comments on the Drug Free America Foundation’s Pathways to Prevention podcast last month.

The Trump administration drug official said that she surrounds herself with pictures of people who have “tragically died” as a result of drugs, saying she “doesn’t want them to die in vain” and uses their stories as a way to remind herself of the importance of ONDCP’s work.

“At first it was the parents who’ve lost children from the oxycodone and pain medicine epidemic and then fentanyl,” Lev said. “And we also remember the victims of weed, the people who’ve died from weed harms as well—or any drug. It doesn’t matter what drug. These are all potentially preventable deaths.”

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), however, says that “no deaths from overdose of weed have been reported”—though the ONDCP medical official may have been referencing people who died as a result of car accidents involving drivers who were under the influence of cannabis, for example.

In the new interview on the prohibitionist organization’s podcast, Lev also said that people who are experiencing addiction should seek treatment “no matter what drugs they’re addicted to.”

“And the fact is that the number one drug of addiction is weed. And for the first time ever in the history of the United States, the rate of substance use disorder is over the amount of alcohol use disorder—because of weed,” she said. “So people are suffering in our country and our strategy acknowledges that and directs efforts toward treatment.”

A new federal study released last month found that Americans are now more likely to use weed nearly every day than they are to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes on a daily basis.

"If people have a weed use disorder and they have an addiction, they should be able to stop,” Lev said. “And we should be even if there’s not a medicine for it. There’s plenty of people who stop smoking cigarettes without a medicine, right? And there are medications for nicotine use disorder, but many people are able to quit and with the guidance. And we want that ability for people who have a weed use.”

The ONDCP official also said the federal government wants people “to make informed decisions and understand the dangers.”

"For example, there are hundreds of medications that interact with weed,” she said. “So, if you’re using weed and you’re also on a blood pressure medicine or a blood thinner or on psychiatric medications, you should look it up and put we have in our prevention framework we have in there. One of the tips is to use drugs.com and put in ‘cannabis’ or ‘weed’ or ‘cannabidiol’ for CBD, and checking that against your medications or grandpa’s medications so you make an informed decision and then you can decide for yourself if you want these and be alerted to the potential side effect.”

Lev also noted during the podcast that “people are buying marijuana or hemp products or psychedelics or whatever it is that’s in the smoke shop these days.”

“None of that has gone through any type of testing and you really don’t know what you’re buying,” she said. “You can’t count on the labels being correct.”

Legalization advocates say that the policy change should be accompanied by regulations mandating that products be tested and labeled for ingredients, something that isn’t possible when drugs are illegal and unregulated.

Lev—an emergency medicine and addition physician—previously linked weed use to suicide, advocated against a Florida legalization measure and criticized health agencies’ move to reschedule cannabis.

She has also said it is an “insult” to refer to cannabis as “medical.”

In one episode of her own High Truths on Drugs and Addiction podcast from June 2024, she dedicated over an hour to a discussion with prohibitionist advocates about the weed rescheduling process that was initiated under the Biden administration, making clear she strongly disagrees with the top federal health agency’s recommendation to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

She said that people who are accepting the scientific findings that led to the recommendation,”including some in the medical community,” are “drinking that same Kool Aid again” with weed as they did with prescription opioids. And she claimed that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) produced a flawed report on cannabis, with mistakes in “like every single sentence.”

“When it comes to weed, the harms are right in front of our eyes—but we ignore the data and follow the industry talking points just like we did in the oxycontin days,” Lev said during the segment, which featured prominent prohibitionists such as Bertha Madras, who also previously served as an ONDCP official.

The revised review process that HHS relied on to reach its Schedule III determination for weed posts a “threat to the entire way of approving medications and to the medical community at large,” Lev said, adding that her primary contention is the idea that cannabis possesses medical value.

Cannabis is “a plant with 500 different chemicals—60 different cannabinoids—many of which have not been studied, and that includes toxins and carcinogens and other things,” she said.

"I really feel sorry for the public—not just for weed—because if you have a 90-page document from the Health and Human Services saying, ‘this is medicine, this is safe, this is monitored’ and all the things that we see in this document, they’re false to us physicians and scientists who review this material,” Lev said. “None of the science used the high-potency products. There was no consideration to the severe mental health impacts.”

“But that’s just for weed. What is the public supposed to think when it comes to vaccines or COVID or any other public health,” she said. “I mean, there’s a loss of trust in medicine because of this process for politics and for money.”

She also cast doubts on the idea that the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) supported HHS’s findings, as was expressed in a letter attached to the federal rescheduling recommendation. Lev said she personally knows people at NIDA, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who oppose the rescheduling proposal.

Further, she disputed the claim that moving weed to Schedule III would increase research opportunities for the plant and its constituents, saying “that’s not true.”

“I don’t have hope that, if this is [rescheduled], it’ll be better regulated, because we could look at all the states now that have quote-unquote medical cannabis, and they’re run by the cannabis industry—not by independent public health people,” Lev claimed. “And we know it’s not working, because we see all the pediatric poisoning and emergency department visits and older people who are poisoned, and that those numbers are going exponentially high. And so we’ve seen that failed process.”

“I think the public has lost confidence in medicine and public health after COVID and all the vaccines—and with this, we’re going to have laws that further deteriorate public health credibility, and this is an example of that,” she said, adding that it also poses an “international threat and weakness of the United States not following international laws.”

That latter comment referenced potential violations of obligations on drug scheduling under United Nations treaties to which the U.S. is a party that some claim mandate the country keep cannabis in either Schedule I or Schedule II.

“The U.S. will be in conflict with international law. That makes things messy,” Lev said earlier in the episode. “We have the right to withdraw from the international treaty, but then if we don’t want to follow international law, how can we expect China and Mexico to follow the law and stop pushing fentanyl on the United States? If the U.S. withdraws from international drug treaties, how does that affect other international treaties like the ones for, say, nuclear weapons?”

The Trump administration has since moved forward with implementing cannabis rescheduling.

Under an order issued by U.S. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in April, weed products regulated by a state medical cannabis license immediately moved from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to Schedule III, as did any weed products that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An administrative hearing is considering broader weed rescheduling.

On another episode of her podcast that was released in October 2024, Lev took on Amendment 3, a 2024 Florida ballot initiative that sought to legalize adult-use cannabis and that received an endorsement from President Donald Trump while he was campaigning. The measure ultimately failed to meet a steep 60 percent threshold for passage.

Despite Trump’s public endorsement, Lev said she wondered if the then-candidate “really read the amendment or really understands the impact of it.” And she said she wished she could have “two minutes with President Trump, because I feel like I could convince him on that.”

In the episode, Lev also dismissed the notion that legalization is smart, quipping that the campaign behind the Florida initiative—Smart & Safe Florida—is a misnomer and “it seems like you can’t always go by the names of these organizations.”

“We need to learn from history,” she said. “And would we want big tobacco to be in charge of the rules and marketing and nicotine potency? Would we want Purdue Pharma to be in charge of opioid overprescribing?” And if not, why are we allowing big weed to control the rules and regulations on public health?”

Separately, during a presentation in Missouri last year, Lev reportedly said that “it’s an insult to our profession” to call marijuana “medical.”

In 2018, Lev attended an event hosted by prohibitionist group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, tweeting a photo of herself with the group’s president, Kevin Sabet, along with the phrase “Weed Death Diaries.”

Other posts she made from the event said advocates “need to get message out about marijuana public health crisis” and that “marijuana victims” speaking there told “heart breaking stories.”

In 2020 she quote-tweeted a post from Sabet about a teen whose parents say he died by suicide after taking up cannabis use, adding, “weed hijacks your brain.”

On social media, Lev has posted extensively about cannabis laws and science, making repeated suggestions tying weed use to mental and physical health conditions such as schizophrenia, suicide risk, lung issues and more.

A federal judge has ruled that an effort by the Trump administration to boot blind vendors from Army bases was carried out illegally.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon moved late last year to waive a contracting priority for blind entrepreneurs in Army dining halls, part of a broader attack on disability rights in the workplace. She claimed with little evidence that the program “adversely affects the interests of the United States.”

Four blind vendors and a pair of advocacy groups sued the administration, arguing that officials ignored the law and that the change was “arbitrary and capricious.”

A judge found in their favor in a July 31 ruling that blocks McMahon’s waiver.

Nicky Gacos, president of the National Association of Blind Merchants, called the decision “a victory for every blind entrepreneur who has invested years of hard work.”

“It preserves those opportunities not only for the entrepreneurs currently serving on Army installations, but for the next generation of blind vendors who deserve the same chance to thrive,” Gacos, whose group was among the plaintiffs, said in a statement Friday.

The fight revolves around a 1936 law, the Randolph-Sheppard Act, that requires the government to give priority to the blind to operate snack bars, gift shops, vending machines and cafeterias on federal property. Advocates say the law has been crucial to giving blind people economic opportunities since the New Deal.

But the Trump administration has attacked rules and programs aimed at boosting minority groups in the workplace, even those that date back decades. Trump’s Army Secretary, Daniel P. Driscoll, has described the Randolph-Sheppard requirement as wasteful, claiming it forces the government to overpay on contracts.

“It’s been interpreted over the years to basically mean we have to prioritize blind people when we go out for our chicken contracts,” he complained on a podcast last year.

Because the Education Department oversees the Randolph-Sheppard program, it was McMahon, a former professional wrestling CEO, who approved a “limitation” of the priority on Army bases, as HuffPost first reported in December. Her notice provided no firm data to back up the overall claim that it “negatively impacts the availability and quality of food options for the nation’s warfighters.”

Neel Lalchandani, an attorney who worked on the case, noted that the law allows for implementing certain limits, like where and when a vending facility operates. But what McMahon pursued was “a sweeping waiver of the act at every Army dining facility nationwide.”

“Those are two very different things,” he told HuffPost. “Our contention all along was that the act doesn’t supply the secretary with that authority.”

In his opinion, George L. Russell, chief judge of the Maryland U.S. District Court, ruled that McMahon had failed to publish supporting documentation showing the program has hurt the Army, and to notify the public of the change and allow for comments.

“It is clear that Secretary McMahon failed to follow the procedural requirements under both the [law] and the Department of Education’s policy,” he wrote.

He added, “The factual findings on which Secretary McMahon relied were, by the [administration’s] admission, incorrect.”

The Education Department didn’t immediately respond Friday when asked for comment on the ruling. The agency previously claimed to HuffPost that the Army faces “significant price and efficiency issues due to the requirement, impacting military readiness.”

Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind, which was also part of the lawsuit, said the administration tried to ditch a 90-year-old commitment to the blind “through a closed process built on incomplete and inaccurate information.”

“The Randolph-Sheppard Act is not a special favor,” he said in a statement Friday. “It is a proven pathway to competitive employment, entrepreneurship, and economic opportunity.”

During last year’s government shutdown, the Trump administration tried to lay off three blind workers within the Education Department who administer the program, part of a much larger demolition of the agency. A deal Congress reached to end the funding lapse included a provision reversing those layoffs and hundreds of others within the department.

Blind entrepreneurs and their advocates say they’ve been appalled by the administration’s attacks on the program.

“The mentality of these people is if we have a disability and we have a job, we’re taking it away from an able-bodied person,” one federal worker told HuffPost last year.

The federal government provided false information in its attempt to prosecute independent journalist Georgia Fort, her lawyers say.

The Guardian reports that in court filings, Fort’s attorneys argue that federal prosecutors are trying to build a case against her over her coverage of a protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, in January. Fort’s team is asking for the case to be dismissed.

The administration has charged nearly 40 people, including Fort and former CNN anchor Don Lemon, over the protest, which centered on the fact that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent serves as a pastor for the congregation.

In at least 15 search warrant applications, Homeland Security Investigations said that Fort was chanting with protesters when they entered the church, a claim that the Department of Justice later admitted was false. Prosecutors tried to argue that the mistake wasn’t consequential because it wasn’t mentioned in Fort’s indictment.

Fort’s lawyers want more information about what prosecutors told the federal grand jury before it decided to indict the journalist, because they could have mentioned other false details.

“It is clear to me that in this case the government in many respects, candidly, has gone off the rails,” Matthew Ebert, one of Fort’s lawyers, said at a July 24 court hearing. “If the government is confused and can’t keep its story straight about the evidence in a 39-defendant case and incorrectly and repeatedly lumps my client, a journalist, together incorrectly with the conduct of others who were engaged in a protest, if they can’t keep it straight, all the more reason I’m concerned about what they said to the grand jury.”

After that hearing, Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko ordered federal prosecutors to turn over all grand jury proceedings related to Fort, as well as another journalist, Michael Beute.

Fort’s lawyers also have objections to federal investigators trying to access Fort’s reporting. A judge has rejected two attempts by investigators to get her work, noting that they seemed to have forgotten the Privacy Protection Act, which protects journalists from being forced to turn over their work to authorities.

The government has tried to gain access to Fort’s social media accounts too, including the names and contact information of her subscribers. When a judge put a stop to that, the government tried to use customs summonses. Those attempts are controversial in that the government won’t admit in writing what information it has obtained or whether it is continuing to use those summonses, suggesting that prosecutors are either trying to hide something, or they know that the government’s activities might not be legal.