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Msw media. Hello and welcome to the Daily beans for Wednesday, December 24, 2025. Today, the Supreme Court has rejected Trump's authority to deploy the National GU under Title 10, Section 12406. The Department of Justice published a suicide note from Jeffrey Epstein to U.S. gymnastics Dr. Larry Nassar. Judge Crenshaw has ordered the release of a sealed document in the Kilmar case that could prove the government lied outright to the court. Congresswoman Joyce Beatty is suing Trump to block the renaming of the John F. Kennedy center for the Performing Arts. A new trove of apparent Epstein files released by the Department of Justice seems to have disappeared. Judge Eileen Cannon says she will lift her blood block on volume two of Jack Smith's final report in February, but she's allowing Trump to intervene and appeal. The Trump administration has purged over 30ambassadors from their posts. And Lamonica McIver returns to the ICE facility where she was framed for assaulting a federal agent to conduct oversight. I'm your host, Allison Gill. Hey, everybody, happy Wednesday. It is Christmas Eve. If you celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas. Otherwise, happy holidays to everyone. We later in the show, I'm going to be talking with Jessica Schubel. It was a fantastic conversation. She's a former White House Affordable Care act director. And we're going to talk about Republicans failure to extend ACA subsidies and the concepts of a plan they passed in the House before Mike Johnson sent everyone on vacation. We're going to talk about what January 1st is going to look like, that we have until January 15th to buy a plan and what the House might do when they come back into session. We'll see. All right. We have a ton of news to get to today. It's been a very busy news day. It's honestly been a really busy news week. I thought the news would sort of slow down this week, but it hasn't. So let's get into it. Let's hit the hot notes. Hot notes. All right, first up from Politico, the Supreme Court has rebuffed President Trump's attempt to deploy National Guard troops in Illinois to protect federal officials carrying out his mass deportation policy. In their ruling Tuesday, the justices noted that federal law generally bars the use of military for law enforcement. And they declared that the law Trump used to activate the Guard is likely only to apply when regular armed forces, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines are insufficient to maintain order. I believe this is also going to apply to the appeal that's going on with Oregon and the deployment of National Guard troops in Portland. So I talked about the this on the November 3 episode of the Breakdown and here on the Daily Beans as well, the breakdown over on Midas Touch. The law Trump was trying to use to justify deployment of the National Guard in Oregon, Portland and the Northern District of Illinois, Chicago, was called Section 12406 under Title 10 of the United States Code. And you might remember I said that the Supreme Court had asked the parties to define what regular forces for the purposes of deploying the National Guard. And I also talked about how I thought that was a pretty good sign that they might rule against Donald Trump's use of 12406 to deploy the National Guard. And that's this case that was decided today. At least the stay was decided today. And that's what happened today. The Supreme Court said no to him. The Supreme Court agrees that regular forces means the military, not local federal police. So Trump cannot deploy the National Guard unless the regular forces fail under 12406. And since he didn't send the military and they didn't fail because he didn't send them, he has no authority under 12406 to deploy the National Guard. Of course, Thomas and Alito and Gorsuch actually dissented. And Kavanaugh added a weird footnote apropos of nothing, total non sequitur, saying, hey, by the way, you know, you can't just stop people because of the color of their skin. I think he was sad that a bunch of people started calling, you know, when ICE detained you for the color of your skin or the language you speak or the job you do, that we were calling it a Kavanaugh stop because he had previously allowed that. And he still, you know, I mean, unless he goes by the footnote he wrote today was all about that saying, oh, you know what, you can sue on an individual basis and all that other stuff. But I think he got really upset about people referring to that as a Kavanaugh stop and just threw that footnote in there for no reason because it doesn't have anything to do with this case. Now, does that mean that Trump will try another way to deploy the National Guard against citizens, like by invoking the Insurrection act to get around the Posse Comitatus act that bars the National Guard to act as law enforcement. So I don't know. We'll see what Stephen Miller decides soon, I imagine. And I also believe we might see a notice of filing in the 9th Circuit about the Oregon deployment of the National Guard now that the Supreme Court has decided Trump doesn't have authority under 12406, because he used that same authority in Portland. This is really good news. I thought they might rule against him, but again, it doesn't mean he won't find a way. It's just not this way. It's just not under 12406. So we'll keep an eye on that. Next up, Judge Crenshaw in the Kilmara Abrego case has ordered the unsealing of an order that he issued on December 3 about whether the government has been lying to the court this whole time when it kept saying it was just the U.S. attorney, just Maguire, all by himself, who made the call to charge Mr. Abrego with two counts of human smuggling so that we could return him to the US without having to go through discovery, without us having to give you our agreement with Bukele, because there'd probably be bad stuff in there that we don't want you to know about. They've been saying this whole time, and Todd Blanche has been saying this whole time, and Mr. Singh has been saying this whole time, the Department of Justice lawyers have been saying, oh, no, no, no, no. Nobody had any hand in, in charging Kilmar Abrego except for the U.S. attorney. So we're gonna, we, you know, we might see that because Crenshaw says that barring intervention from higher court, he's going to unseal that filing on December 30, which is six days from now. And like I said, this could have major consequences for the government, including contempt proceedings, could be sanctions, which could be go as far as disbarment for some of these attorneys. So I'll keep an eye on the docket for you on that. Also, I just wanted to give you this little note here from the Associated Press. Kilmer Abrego Garcia will spend Christmas with his family after spending much of the year in custody. U.S. district Judge Polissini's in Maryland issued an order late on Monday requiring the government attorneys to file brief by December 26 on whether they plan to take him back into immigration custody and under what legal authority they would do so. His attorneys have until December 30th to respond. A temporary restraining order that bars Immigration and Customs Enforcement from detaining him remains in place. In the meantime, quote, this decision means Kilmar gets to sleep in his own bed in the next coming days without fear of being separated from his family and his community in the middle of the night. That's Lydia Walter Rodriguez, that's an organizer with the community group casa. And she said this in an Email. All right, next up from the Times, the Trump administration has ordered nearly 30ambassadors in embassies around the world to return to the United States within weeks, a move that would leave a large gap in the American diplomatic corps. Even as Trump has said he wants to resolve conflicts through diplomacy. Many of the ambassadors were told in recent days to leave their posts by mid January. They are all Foreign Service officers who had been appointed to their positions in the Biden administration and confirmed by the Senate. A standard tour is three to four years. The union representing career diplomats said this is the first time that such a mass recall has taken place of career diplomats serving as ambassadors or chiefs of mission. Quote, those affected report being notified abruptly, typically by phone, with no explanation. That's Nikki Gamer, a spokeswoman for the union that represents career diplomats, the American Foreign Service association. Quote, that method is highly irregular. Ms. Gmer said that after checking its archives, the union, quote, can say definitively that such a mass recall has never happened since the founding of the Foreign Service as we know it now. Candidates for ambassador are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. There are two types of ambassadors, career diplomats and political appointees. The latter are often donors or friends of the president, and they are expected to offer their resignations at the start of a new administration. That was the case when Trump took office in January, and he immediately accepted the resignations. But that is not the norm for career diplomats who often serve for years into a new administration. The Trump administration did not give a reason for the recalls and has not publicly announced them. Wondering if we'll see a lawsuit. Also from the Times. Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat from Ohio, amazing woman, sued Trump on Monday, seeking to force the removal of his name from the John F. Kennedy center for the performing arts. Ms. Beatty's lawsuit names as defendants Mr. Trump and the loyalists he appointed to the center's board. The suit contends that the board's vote to change the name last week was illegal because an act of Congress is required to rename the building. Ms. Beatty is represented by Norm Eisen, our friend, White House ethics counsel in the Obama administration, along with Nathaniel Zelensky, his co counsel of the Washington litigation group. Norm says sorry. Ambassador Eisen says that the name change, quote, violates the Constitution and rule of law because Congress said it. This is the name. He doesn't have the right to change the name. Now. A senior White House official told the Times last week that the administration rejected that interpretation and that the White House did not anticipate Congress getting involved. To override this decision now, on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the Kennedy center said the board considered the State Department's renaming of the US Institute of Peace after Mr. Trump as precedent for renaming the performing arts center. The White House didn't respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit. The president's name was added to the face of the building on Friday morning. The center's website and various social media accounts now refer to the Trump Kennedy Center. Ms. Beatty is an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center's board. By law, a handful of members of Congress from both parties sit on the board. So she's on the board. She had called into the meeting on the phone last week at which the name change was voted on, but couldn't object because they muted her. So we'll be following that lawsuit as well. All right, let's get to the Epstein files news today. Late last night, people began posting a handwritten note that had apparently come from Jeffrey Epstein to the US Gymnastics doctor who was investigated for his child sexual abuse, Dr. Larry Nassar. But I thought it seemed a little sus because first of all, a documents expert friend of mine pointed out that the postmark was wrong. It came from Virginia, not New York. The return to sender address was wrong. It didn't include his prisoner number. It seemed to back the government assertions that Epstein died by suicide. It seemed like a suicide note. And the DOJ had released a fake video of his apparent suicide as well. So we know they fake stuff all the time. But the DOJ also released an FBI request for a handwriting analysis of that letter, an old one, as part of the Epstein files release. So there was an analysis done. At least one was requested, but they didn't post the results. So that seemed weird. I thought the government might be setting a trap where we all say, ooh, look at this, look. He mentioned Donald Trump in this letter so that the DOJ could later debunk it and say that we all, you know, assumed something about Trump that wasn't true and maybe question the credibility of all the documents that mentioned Trump's name. Because this handwritten note mentioned Trump. Well, sure enough, a few hours later, the Department of Justice said they had investigated the letter just two hours later and that they determined it was fake. And haha, see you Democrats. This is all a hoax, so be mindful out there. I do not know whether this letter is fake or not. I personally don't believe it's real. I think this was a trap, but maybe there'll be evidence that it is. Why didn't the DOJ release the findings of the handwriting analysis. When they released that letter, they released that letter and then let it sit there so that we would all go look at this and then came back and said we looked into it.
