May 20, 2025 - Trump's Personal Lawyer Files Charges Against Member of Congress
Plus: MAGA comes for Medicaid tonight, how to find reliable news sources and more
🚨 We can phonebank any time from 2:00PM to 11:00PM today to rally voters against the MAGA murder budget… or door-knock in key districts… or find more ways to help here 🚨
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🚨 TRUMP DOJ CHARGES DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSWOMAN FOR ATTEMPTING TO DO OVERSIGHT ON ICE🚨
Last night, we learned that acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba, formerly Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is charging Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) with assault and impeding a law enforcement officer over the confrontation created by ICE agents when the Congresswoman and several of her colleagues attempted to do their job and conduct an oversight visit at an immigration detention facility in Newark. (Habba is dropping charges against Mayor Ras Baraka, who was arrested for trespassing at the time.)
This act comes just months after Trump pardoned violent insurrectionists who assaulted police in the name of returning him to the White House on January 6th. It is also the latest escalation in this administration’s efforts to use state power to criminalize dissent at a very basic level and punish those they deem political enemies, especially those who push back against mass deportation and mass detention.
Let’s speak plainly. Trying to throw opposition politicians in jail on flimsy excuses is tyrannical, the stuff of tinpot dictatorships. And their excuse is deeply weak – it seems unlikely ICE would have allowed McIver to tour the facility after committing an assault against them. Trump is attempting to use the government as a weapon, silencing those who have spoken up against him. This is not something leaders do in free, democratic nations. It is something real Americans resist.
There will be plenty to do in the days ahead. For today, let’s start with loudly condemning this personally, and not shutting up about it – and demanding our leaders do the same. We need to tell our members of Congress to insist these charges be dropped, and call on Habba to testify under oath about how they came about, who approved them and who may have directed her to file them. We can use language here or send this message via Resistbot by texting SIGN PDFUPJ to 50409.
We can also send a note of support to Rep. McIver here. Let’s show her some solidarity.
🚨 NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY AGAINST THE MURDER BUDGET AS RULES COMMITTEE SET TO MEET 🚨
How badly does Speaker Mike Johnson not want the public paying attention to the MAGA Murder Budget? Having pushed it through the Budget Committee after 10PM on Sunday, he’s now hoping to pass it through the Rules Committee in the literal dead of night – starting the meeting at 1AM this evening.
It’s still not clear this bill can pass the House, even with their concessions to the Freedom Caucus on earlier Medicaid cuts and deeper rollbacks to clean energy. (Though in better news, the nonprofit killer provision has been quietly removed.) They are actively still negotiating the final text. Trump will head to Capitol Hill this morning to try to rally support, but Republican senators are leaking trial balloons again suggesting the “one big beautiful bill” will have to be split up. Right now, it’s all hanging in the balance. Let’s do our best to tip the scales against selling out low-income families to bail out billionaires.
Today a big tent coalition of progressive groups are holding a national call-in day to our members of Congress to tell them to stop cutting Medicaid and SNAP to pay for billionaire tax cuts. We can find scripts and a tool to make the call here.
And we can find a full guide to more actions we can take to stop the bill (Phonebanks! Storytelling! Social media content!) here.
🔬 TELL CONGRESS: WE NEED FEDERAL RESEARCH FUNDING 🔬
As the Trump regime slashes billions of dollars in federal funding to universities to extort compliance with the unlegislated Project 2025 agenda, it is worth noting that federal investments in research and development have led to things like the internet, mobile and personal computing, healthcare advances that have extended US life expectancy by nearly 20 years, and so much more. It’s been estimated that for every dollar invested, the return to society is $5 or more. Economists say that the private sector will never be able to pick up the slack of lost federal research funding, and the loss of this funding will hurt our economy and prevent the discovery of life-saving innovations.
The Universities of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Utah and Oregon and the Georgia Institute of Technology teamed up to create an interactive map showing how the loss of funding and jobs are distributed across the country. We can use the information to see how much our local economies are set to suffer from Trump and DOGE and help our friends, family members, business leaders, and legislators understand the real-world impact of destroying the National Institutes of Health.
Let’s check out the map, then use the information to tell our Members of Congress to demand that the Trump regime stop withholding the federal research funds that were duly appropriated by Congress. We can find a base script here.
PUBLIC COMMENTS AGAINST THE POLITICIZATION OF PUBLIC SERVICES - DEADLINE FRIDAY
Trump is attempting to go even further to unravel public services we count on and purge federal workers. He has proposed a rule to reinstate Schedule F, which would turn 50,000 or more career civil servants into political appointees – requiring them to be loyal to him and bolstering personalist authoritarianism.
The Office of Personnel Management is accepting public comments on this proposed rule, but the deadline to submit is THIS FRIDAY. The Federal Unionists Network has put out a toolkit on how to submit one here. Let’s check out the toolkit and make our voices heard here.
We can also join FUN’s #SaveOurServices rapid response network by signing up here.
🗞️ LEARN TO FIND RELIABLE NEWS SOURCES IN FREE VIRTUAL TRAINING THURSDAY 🗞️
Disinformation is all over the internet. It spreads quickly because it seems believable and is easy to share. That’s why it’s important to build good online habits, like pausing before sharing something to confirm it’s true with reliable news sources - as Maria Ressa says, to think slow, not fast. But how do we know a reliable news source these days?
Red, Wine and Blue is here to help, offering us a free virtual Troublemaker Training on THURSDAY at 7:30PM ET with journalist and Stanford professor Janine Zacharia. She’ll teach us how to find news we can trust and spot the fakes. Learning how to tell what’s true online helps protect our democracy — and it starts with us. We can sign up here for the latest Troublemaker Training session here.
Even if we can’t make it live, we can still sign up and get the recording later! We can also find more information on spotting and stopping the flow of disinformation from previous sessions here.
KEEPING AN EYE ON…
If you live in Nassau county, New York: https://deceivednation.com/?p=4421