Trump Fires Federal Judge After Just 54 Minutes in Office
Federal agents raided four NYT journalists' homes over Trump's Qatari jet, the FBI is using AI to second-guess 150,000 Georgia ballots, and Pete Hegseth wants to test the military's testosterone
Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.
A federal prosecutor was sworn in as U.S. attorney in Seattle at 7:40 a.m. and fired by Trump at 8:34 a.m. Federal agents descended on the homes of four New York Times journalists over a story about Trump’s $400 million Qatari jet. The FBI is exploring AI signature-matching on 150,000 mail-in ballots it seized from a Democratic county in Georgia. And Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon will annually screen troops’ testosterone and offer replacement therapy in the name of “lethality.”
Before we get into the news, a brief ask. AlterNet America runs on paid subscribers and nothing else. We don’t have a billionaire owner, a corporate parent or a hedge fund quietly deciding what we can and can’t say. Just readers who believe independent journalism is worth funding. Right now we are behind on our fundraising goals, and we need you to help close that gap. Corporate media and the oligarch-funded outlets propping up this regime will never answer to their readers the way we do. Become a paid subscriber today and keep independent journalism alive.
Trump Fired an Attorney 54 Minutes After He Was Sworn In
Roger Rogoff had a U.S. attorney tenure so brief he never even got the Wi-Fi password.
At 7:40 a.m. Wednesday, federal judges in the Western District of Washington swore in Roger Rogoff, a former King County Superior Court judge and federal prosecutor, as their pick for U.S. attorney. Fifty-four minutes later, Donald Trump fired him.
Rogoff was waiting in the lobby of the downtown U.S. District Courthouse to meet the outgoing interim, Neil Floyd, and presumably take his office, when the email arrived saying he was done.
The mechanics matter. Federal law lets a district’s judges appoint a U.S. attorney when the president never sends a formal nomination to the Senate. Trump never nominated Floyd. He appointed him interim, let that term expire on Feb. 3, then rebranded him a “first assistant” to dodge Senate advice and consent entirely.
The 17 sitting judges responded to that workaround the way the statute allows: they picked their own. Rogoff’s lawyers are now expected to sue the administration and the DOJ.
Senator Patty Murray called Rogoff “eminently qualified” and said Trump wants “some Trump administration sock puppet” instead. At least a puppet gets to perform before it’s put away.
Trump Sends Federal Agents to Reporters’ Homes
The plane can’t protect the president, but the president will be damned if he can’t protect the plane’s reputation.
On Friday night, federal agents descended on the residences of New York Times journalists Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt. Their reported crime was writing about the $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 “gifted” to Trump by the Qatari royal family.
The story was not flattering. National security experts had warned the foreign jet needed at least two years of retrofitting. Trump rushed it. When he flew it to a NATO summit in Turkey, the Secret Service intervened on the return trip because the plane lacked basic defensive countermeasures amid escalating hostilities with Iran.
So the president of the United States boarded the old Air Force One for the ride home and left his $400 million palace in the sky behind.
The four reporters now face possible contempt of court and jail if they refuse to name their sources. FBI Director Kash Patel was reportedly hauled into the White House for an eight-hour Friday strategy session to micromanage the leak hunt.
Notably, nobody has claimed the reporting is false. On Monday, Pete Hegseth announced a joint Pentagon-DOJ task force to prosecute leakers, promising “the full force of the law.”
They could show up at our door tomorrow. We’re going to keep publishing anyway, because the story was true and the public deserved to know it. That costs money, and the only people paying for it are subscribers. Become a paid one today.
The FBI Is Using AI to Second-Guess 150,000 Georgia Ballots
When the manual recount, the audits, and the courts all fail to find the fraud, there is always a chatbot.
The FBI has explored using artificial intelligence to assess signatures on tens of thousands of mail-in ballot envelopes it seized from Fulton County, Georgia, part of the Trump administration’s unprecedented reinvestigation of the 2020 vote. Internal communications show officials weighed commercial tools from OpenAI and Anthropic.
In January, the FBI raided Fulton County and hauled off about 700 boxes of election materials, including roughly 150,000 mail-in ballots. About 116,000 of them went for Biden, who beat Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes.
The bureau has also redirected 260 analysts from field offices nationwide onto the probe. MS Now has reported that some analysts were fired rather than work on it.
The experts are not encouraging. Signature matching disproportionately rejects ballots cast by voters of color and by young, old, new, disabled, and unaffiliated voters. One political scientist testified in an Ohio case that his analysis suggested 32 legitimate ballots were blocked for every illegitimate one.
The FBI’s own plan would compare only a voter’s registration signature to the one on the envelope, a thin sample that would inflate false discrepancies. Some FBI staffers are reportedly flagging the limitations to blunt the pressure to find fraud. Leadership is pushing forward anyway.
Pete Hegseth Wants to Check the Military’s Testosterone Levels
The Pentagon has weapons systems, aircraft carriers, and a nuclear arsenal. What it was missing, apparently, was a hormone panel.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that the military will begin annually screening service members’ testosterone levels and offering testosterone replacement therapy, framing it as a way to keep troops on the “leading edge of lethality.” The screening will affect troops 30 and older, added to their periodic health assessment. Those under 30 can volunteer.
“While we invest heavily in our weapon systems, platforms and gear, our most decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual warfighter,” Hegseth said in a video posted to X. The caption read: “The High-T Department of War.”
The obsession is not new. In January, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Mehmet Oz had reviewed Trump’s medical records and found “the highest testosterone levels that he’s ever seen for an individual over 70.” In April, the FDA moved to expand access to TRT after decades of limiting it to men with actual medical deficiencies.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host, has already imposed a “male standard” fitness test on the entire military and told a room of officials last September that he didn’t want to see “fat generals and admirals.”
Roughly 5.6 percent of men between 30 and 79 have a genuine testosterone deficiency. Even for that 5.6 percent, the main symptom is being a little tired, which also describes everyone who has ever served in the military.
No Billionaire, No Problem
We covered every single story above because we know corporate media and billionaire-owned outlets will either bury them or water them down beyond recognition. AlterNet America answers to no billionaire or corporate board. We answer to you, our readers, and that’s only because paid subscribers make that possible.
Corporate media and the oligarch-funded outlets propping up this regime will never answer to their readers the way we do. They can’t. Their owners won’t let them. We can, because you make it possible.
Become a paid subscriber today. Independent journalism won’t survive on good intentions. It can only endure if people like you decide it is worth funding.
Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.
POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
US Groups Sue Trump Over ICC Sanctions They Say Silence Americans. Two advocacy organizations filed suit in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday, arguing that Trump’s 2025 sanctions targeting Palestinian rights groups, ICC officials, and a UN expert have unlawfully chilled Americans’ First Amendment rights. Democracy for the Arab World Now and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide say the sanctions have forced them to sever professional relationships and abandon protected advocacy work, with employees facing criminal prosecution under executive order 14203. The 43-page complaint names Trump, Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Todd Blanche, and OFAC director Brad Smith, arguing the sanctions exceed presidential authority under a law that exempts noncommercial “personal communications.”
NYC to Offer Free Childcare for 500 Kids Across the City. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced the city’s first-ever “Parents’ Night Out,” a free drop-off program on August 16 where up to 500 kids ages 6 to 13 can spend four hours at Parks Department rec centers across all five boroughs while their parents go do literally anything else. The kids get supervised games, sports, arts and crafts, nature exploration with Urban Park Rangers, and a boxed dinner. Parents get 4 to 8 p.m. to recharge, run errands, have a date night, or simply experience the alien sensation of not being needed for a few consecutive hours. Registration opened Sunday and runs through July 20, first come first served, no walk-ins, 100 spots per borough.
Environmental Groups Sue to Stop Trump’s Rewrite of the Word “Harm.” For more than 50 years, the Endangered Species Act defined “harm” to include the “significant habitat modification or degradation” that keeps a protected species from feeding, breeding, or sheltering. The Trump administration has now rescinded that definition, a change set to take effect September 14 that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum framed as restoring “common sense” for landowners. Within days, Earthjustice and more than half a dozen groups sued the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries in federal court in Seattle, and the Swinomish and Squaxin Island Tribes filed a separate suit citing habitat loss driving down Puget Sound salmon. The Supreme Court upheld the habitat definition in 1995’s Babbitt v. Sweet Home.
Four Children With Terminal Brain Cancer Saved by New Cell Therapy. Researchers at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. ran a Phase I clinical trial in which they pulled T-cells out of 33 kids with some of the most lethal brain cancers in existence, trained those cells to recognize the cancer, put them back in, and watched four of the children survive years beyond what anyone expected, three of them with no detectable disease. Immunotherapy has worked on blood cancers for a while now but has been famously useless against solid tumors, particularly in the brain. It’s a tiny trial with no control group, so nobody is spiking the football, but one of the researchers summarized the situation with the understatement of the year: “These children are getting to grow up — it’s truly awesome.”