It’s important at a historical moment like this to keep our heads about us. Social media was filled with dark warnings about authoritarianism on Friday after the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan and charged her with illegally helping an undocumented immigrant avoid being detained by federal agents. I even saw a quote attributed to Hitler.
We should leave it to the legal system to determine whether Judge Dugan broke the law or not. But, to their credit, a number of news organizations noted that the Dugan case is remarkably similar to that of Massachusetts District Court Judge Shelley Joseph. Joseph was charged by federal authorities in 2019 with obstruction of justice after she helped an undocumented immigrant escape out the back of her courtroom when she learned that the feds were waiting to take him into custody.
Charges against Joseph were dropped in 2022 after she agreed to a state investigation into her conduct. As of late 2024, her case was still wending its way through the disciplinary system.
There is one major similarity to the Joseph and Dugan cases: they took place while Donald Trump was president. And there are a few differences as well. Dugan is claiming that she did not violate the law, and that she told the federal agents that their administrative warrant was invalid — that, instead, they needed a judicial warrant. She directed them to the chief judge’s office.
Perhaps the most significant difference is that though Judge Joseph was indicted, she was not arrested. Judge Dugan, by contrast, was frog-marched before a federal judge Friday and released. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that “she was not in a jumpsuit when she appeared in court but was instead wearing a black dress with white flowers.” So at least there was that.
I would like to think that I’d do the same thing as Dugan and Joseph, but I wouldn’t kid myself that my actions would be without consequences. Trump’s crude, thuggish campaign against undocumented immigrants is repulsive, but Dugan’s arrest on Friday did not create a constitutional crisis any more than Joseph’s indictment did in 2019.
In fact, the Trump White House really did create a constitutional crisis on Friday: a 2-year-old U.S. citizen — a native-born American — was deported to Honduras along with her mother. Of course, Trump doesn’t think the 14th Amendment protects the children of undocumented immigrants who are born in the U.S., despite the amendment’s clear language.
Springing a leak
In a similar vein, you may have seen some alarming reports that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has reversed guidance issued by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, and opened the door to subpoenaing documents and testimony from journalists so that the administration can investigate leaks to the news media.
Is this bad? Yes, it’s bad. Is it unexpected? Again, no. At the start of every administration, the attorney general issues guidance on how the Justice Department should treat journalists. There is no federal shield law protecting journalists’ records and sources, even though 49 states have some form of protection. (Wyoming is the sole exception.) So it’s up to federal authorities to set the rules of the road.
Garland’s guidance, supported by Joe Biden, was unusually progressive, and it reversed the anti-press policies of Trump’s first term. During Barack Obama’s presidency, however, journalists were regularly threatened with jail if they did not turn over confidential information.
So we should regard Bondi’s announcement as a continuation of past policies aimed at restricting the media’s ability to hold powerful institutions to account. In other words, it’s terrible, but it’s hardly unprecedented.
Bezos’ original sin
Long before Jeff Bezos took a baseball bat to the The Washington Post’s opinion section, he committed what I would regard as his original sin: In November 2023 he hired Fleet Street veteran Will Lewis as publisher, and he stubbornly stuck with him even as Lewis became mired deeper and deeper into scandal.
The most serious of those scandals were allegations that Lewis, during his time as a Murdoch henchman in the U.K., may have withheld records pertaining to hacking scandal that for a time threatened Murdoch’s British papers. (Sorry for the repeated use of the words “Murdoch” and “scandal,” but it’s hard to avoid when writing about Lewis.)
On Friday, the situation got worse — much worse. Daniel Boffey reports for The Guardian:
Rupert Murdoch’s company, News Group Newspapers, has been accused by former detectives of having “actively frustrated” their U.K. investigation into phone hacking, with one concluding a senior executive could have been arrested for perverting the course of justice, according to a newly disclosed court document.
The senior executive, Will Lewis, is now chief executive and publisher of The Washington Post.
Boffey notes that Lewis has denied any wrongdoing.
There is something deeply ironic about the decline of the Post over the past year and a half. If you actually look at the paper, you can only conclude that it’s as fiercely dedicated to rooting out the truth as it’s always been, offering the same tough coverage of the White House as it did during Trump’s first term.
And though several Post opinion journalists, including cartoonist Ann Telnaes and columnist Ruth Marcus, quit after their work criticizing Bezos was killed, there are few signs that the opinion section has gone MAGA, as we all feared it would after Bezos announced in February that the section would be devoted exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets.” In fact, the opinion section continues to publish quite a bit of material that’s highly critical of Trump.
Sadly, Bezos has managed to accomplish the neat trick of destroying the Post’s reputation for independence, leading to a stampede of subscribers, while maintaining the Post as a great news organization. The trust is gone, even as the excellent journalism remains.
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