Subpoenas, Lawsuits and the Lido Deck

The government investigates Trump’s political enemies, the BBC investigates Trump’s claims, and an oil shock from Hormuz finds its way into everyone else’s wallet.

Good morning! Four days after Alex Pretti was shot dead on a Minneapolis street, the Department of Homeland Security opened a file on the people who’d been protesting the agents.

The operation was called Puppet Master, later followed by Whipple Shield, and according to a motion filed this week by defense attorney Kevin Riach in United States v. Isaac Sant et al., its targets reached well beyond the 15 people eventually indicted. Undercover agents infiltrated meetings and group chats; unions and nonprofits were hit with financial subpoenas reaching back three years; and prosecutors showed a federal grand jury a diagram linking Direct Action Minnesota to organizations including the AFL-CIO, SEIU and, improbably, a bicycle repair shop.

Some of the defendants are accused of conduct that was plainly more than protest, including obstructing federal agents and throwing objects at law-enforcement vehicles. But the government’s own records also describe agents sitting through meetings devoted to peaceful protest and de-escalation. One undercover agent, identified in HSI paperwork as UCA 9833, reported that Sunrise Movement members discussed de-escalation tactics and a police liaison and that the group’s stated focus was “peaceful” protest.

You are reading that correctly. Inside the government’s own surveillance file on an alleged conspiracy involving political violence sits a contemporaneous account from an undercover agent saying that the people he was infiltrating were trying to avoid it.

Fifteen people were indicted in June. Eighteen organizations were presented to the grand jury as part of a broader conspiracy. Financial records were obtained from groups never charged with anything. Attendees at a church meeting had their license plates recorded, identities established and social-media profiles examined. The question is how far federal investigators traveled outward from those allegations into the political lives of people and organizations that were never accused of breaking the law.

Minnesota is looking less like an isolated example than part of a recognizable pattern. In Chicago, the U.S. attorney’s office spent the past year investigating Authentic Campaigns, a Democratic fundraising firm once co-owned by Loren Merchan, daughter of the judge who presided over Trump’s hush-money conviction. The investigation grew from a criminal referral by House Judiciary Republicans based on a theory Trump allies have pushed since 2024: that Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter financially benefited from her father’s conduct on the bench.

According to the New York Times, the original grand-jury subpoena sought internal communications involving Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Kathy Hochul, Hakeem Jeffries, the DNC and others. Its language closely tracked claims made in the House referral that Trump’s prosecution might have been politically motivated. The subpoena did not identify what crime prosecutors believed had been committed.

After lawyers pushed back, prosecutors narrowed the demand dramatically: to a $468 payment from the Harris campaign and emails between Loren Merchan and her father. No follow-up subpoenas have reportedly been issued to individuals, suggesting prosecutors may not now be building toward charges. The investigation raises an uncomfortable question about how much political effect an investigation can have simply by existing, by compelling records, exposing private communications, and placing the machinery of a federal grand jury behind a theory born in partisan politics.

Two federal offices, two unrelated dockets, one increasingly familiar pattern: politically identified targets, expansive investigations, and serious questions about whether the asserted criminal predicate justified their reach. The subpoena, the dossier, the years of financial records, the process is itself an exercise of power, whether or not charges ever follow.

That makes our next story almost medicinal.

Because sometimes Donald Trump deploys the legal system against someone else, and then, through one of those charming procedural quirks the Founders forgot to abolish, the other side gets lawyers too.

Trump is suing the BBC for $10 billion over a Panorama documentary that edited together portions of his January 6 speech in a way he says was misleading and defamatory.

The BBC is aggressively defending itself. Somewhere along the way, someone apparently asked the very sensible question: exactly how many Americans watched this allegedly civilization-altering broadcast?

The answer, according to deposition testimony from the BBC’s director of digital distribution, is spectacular.

The program was streamed roughly 570,000 times on BBC iPlayer.

Only 285 streams came from IP addresses that could have been located in the United States.

Not 285,000. Two hundred eighty-five. Of those, only 34 were associated with Florida, where Trump filed the lawsuit.

And even that is apparently generous. The BBC executive testified that U.S.-registered IP addresses do not necessarily mean viewers were physically inside the United States. Most of those 34 Florida-associated streams reportedly traced back to an IP address connected with Carnival, the cruise-line company headquartered in Florida.

So the evidentiary foundation beneath a $10 billion claim may include an audience segment consisting partly of people somewhere on a Carnival network.

Finally, a lawsuit that asks the profound constitutional question: What if democracy was destroyed on the Lido Deck?

It gets better. The 285 potentially American streams cover approximately the entire year the documentary was available. Only about one week of that period came before the 2024 election. So even 285 substantially overstates the identifiable U.S. audience relevant to any claim that the program interfered with the election.

Discovery is now expanding in the other direction. The BBC has gone to federal court seeking authority to use alternative methods to serve subpoenas on Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, people it believes may possess evidence relevant to Trump’s intentions surrounding January 6, his state of mind and the reputational damages he claims to have suffered.

Trump retreated earlier from claims that his businesses had been damaged, claims that would have opened his financial records to broader discovery.

That is the thing about litigation. The courthouse door swings both ways.

You can file a $10 billion lawsuit alleging that a British documentary watched by approximately enough identifiable Americans to populate a handful of Greyhound buses annihilated your reputation.

Once the lawsuit is filed, the defendant gains reciprocal tools: demanding documents, taking depositions, probing the plaintiff’s claims, and, if relevant, seeking testimony from members of his own family.

This administration increasingly treats subpoenas as instruments of political power; Trump is now discovering that subpoenas are also instruments of civil procedure. One has to love the symmetry.

Unfortunately, the consequences of another exercise of presidential power are considerably less funny.

While Washington fights over investigations, dossiers and deposition notices, the rest of the world continues paying for the Iran war.

The Strait of Hormuz remains unresolved. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says Tehran is continuing negotiations with Oman over shipping routes but is still tying the strait’s reopening to U.S. compliance with the memorandum agreed in June. This is the same waterway Trump has repeatedly described as effectively under American control. Markets seem to have missed the memo.

Military dominance and functioning energy markets are not the same thing, and so far the Gulf is proving that distinction in real time. The disruption to shipping has tightened global oil supplies and driven up costs for governments and central banks thousands of miles from the fighting. A blockage in Hormuz becomes a fuel bill in London, a transportation-cost problem in Tokyo, a gasoline price in the United States, and eventually an inflation number, then a Federal Reserve problem, then a mortgage problem, for people who could not find the strait on a map.

The administration’s options elsewhere increasingly look constrained by what you might call a market-stability veto. Washington can press Iran, but not so hard that Hormuz stays unusable indefinitely. It can back Ukrainian strikes on the infrastructure financing Russia’s war, until disrupted Middle Eastern supply makes every additional missing barrel politically dangerous. Strategic escalation and stable prices are increasingly at odds with each other, and the oil market is the one negotiating from a position of leverage.

Calling this Trump’s “war of choice” is an argument about responsibility. But the bill doesn’t require an ideological adjective: whatever Washington believes it is achieving strategically, much of the cost is being distributed globally to people who had no vote in the decision.

Which brings us back to the common thread running through everything this morning.

Power rarely stays confined to the purpose announced for it.

A directive against political violence produces surveillance of political organizations. A partisan congressional referral leads to a grand-jury subpoena reaching deep into Democratic political communications. A president’s defamation suit opens his own finances and family to discovery. A regional war becomes a global inflation problem.

The administration likes to present power as simple: identify the enemy, deploy the machinery, win. But machinery built to act on somebody else has a habit of eventually revealing what’s inside it.