The Situation: Things You Might Have Missed Over Thanksgiving

The Situation on Wednesday offered you the chance to play Lindsey Halligan’s hand from here on out in the James Comey case. 

Since then, over the holiday weekend, a number of things happened to which a person concerned about The Situation might have normally paid attention. Herein, a partial list of things you might have missed:

Lindsey Halligan, it turns out, is not the only interim United States attorney whom courts have determined to have been illegally installed in her office.

A cross-ideological panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has declared the appointment of Alina Habba (remember her?) as U.S. attorney in New Jersey to have been unlawful as well. The unanimous opinion upholds a lower court ruling to the same effect, actually on a different grounds than the court in the Comey and Letitia James cases declared Halligan to be unlawfully occupying her office.

There are, it seems, so many different ways to end up in front of a grand jury illegally—and to seek indictments improperly there. 

And the administration is apparently looking for more. FBI Director Kash Patel gave an extended interview over the weekend to the Epoch Times, in which he discussed the Comey case notwithstanding an admission up front that it remains “pending.” Here’s what he said:

Q: The criminal case against Director Comey was recently dismissed. What is your reaction to that?

PATEL: Well, because it’s pending in terms of appellate status and what we are going to do for the next steps, the judicial process can make whatever determination it wants, but we the FBI and our partners at the DOJ, have numerous options to proceed, and we’re executing on all of those options. So we’re not done.

Q: Any detail available?

PATEL: I would say, stay tuned for right after Thanksgiving and you’ll see multiple responses, in my opinion.

It’s good that we have an FBI director who promises action against named individuals on specific time tables, no?

A college student named Any Lucia López Belloza was traveling home to Texas from school in New England to surprise her family for the holiday, when she was detained at the airport in Boston and then deported to Honduras. This happened despite a court order that the government “will not remove [her] from the jurisdiction of the United States . . . for a period of at least at least 72 hours” to give the court a chance to hear her case. She had been in the United States since she was seven years old, the New York Times reports.

The New York Times also reports that Northwestern University has decided that the moment is ripe to capitulate to Trump administration demands and pay $75 million in extortion money to free up a much larger sum of research dollars the administration has frozen:

Northwestern’s payments will be made to the U.S. Treasury over the next three years, according to the deal. The government agreed to close three federal investigations — by the Education, Health and Human Services and Justice Departments — without any acknowledgment of wrongdoing by the university.

. . .

The Northwestern agreement also requires the university to revise all policies, protocols and public-facing materials on hormonal interventions and transgender surgeries for children at its Feinberg School of Medicine, and “ensure compliance with federal laws.” The medical school has been involved in research on transgender hormonal treatments for children and adolescents, finding that hormone therapy has positive effects on physical and mental health.

. . .

The deal with the government also requires the university to revoke the so-called Deering Meadow agreement, which it signed in 2024 to end campus encampments in protest of Israel and the war in Gaza. Under the agreement, the university vowed to reverse all policies implemented under the 2024 accord [under which] the university promised to increase transparency into its financial holdings and to provide support for Palestinians, including in the form of two slots for visiting faculty members and full scholarships for five undergraduate students.

. . .

The new deal requires Northwestern to survey the school body, asking whether students feel welcome and they feel safe reporting antisemitism, among other questions.

All of that is all before we come to the subject of the intentional killing of men clinging to wrecked boats by the Department of Defense, allegedly on the personal order of the Secretary of Defense—who wants us to call him the Secretary of War but perhaps has better earned the title of the Secretary of Murder.

The Washington Post reports:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack—the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere—ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

This order, of course, Secretary Hegseth hotly denies having given—sort of.

“This entire narrative is completely false,” his spokesman said in a statement that went on to insist that, “Ongoing operations to dismantle narcoterrorism and to protect the Homeland from deadly drugs have been a resounding success.” Which is something less than a denial that a kill-them-all order emerged from the secretary’s mouth. Kind of more like: This story is completely false to the extent the Post suggests that our killing of shipwrecked survivors was ineffective or less than a resounding success.

The president also denies the order took place: “Trump said Hegseth told him ‘he did not say that, and I believe him, 100 percent.’” But the President also said, just to cover all the bases, that “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine.”

And Hegseth, for his own part, is not quite all in on the whole denial thing. 

In Twitter posts on Friday, he called the story “fake news. . . delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting.” But he also declared that “these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’” 

And he later added just in case anyone was confused about the message: “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”

Congress is promising vigorous oversight, for which you should not wait with baited breath.

And the president paused consideration of all asylum cases.

And he’s planning to pardon the former Honduran president, who was sentenced to 45 years in 2024 for a giant drug trafficking scheme. 

And he declared a no-fly zone over Venezuela by means of a Truth Social post.

And, yes, The Situation continues tomorrow.