There are certainly serious matters to catch up on this morning, but the unseriousness ones are overwhelming them like an Executive Branch glioblastoma.
Federal prosecutors spent over a year working to extradite a Belarusian woman accused of smuggling more than $2 million in sensitive U.S. aviation equipment into Russia as it waged war on Ukraine.
But the case could fall apart because the defendant, Yana Leonova, is now at risk of being deported before going to trial.
Leonova faces a 10-count indictment from AG Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice for fraud, smuggling and money-laundering. Oh, and an immigration detainer from Secretary Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security. ICE wants to deport Lenova to Belarus if she’s released from a D.C. jail. She was only approved for a two-week stay in the U.S.
A federal magistrate judge called the situation “Kafkaesque” at a hearing in U.S. District Court in D.C. on Monday, and said in a written order that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s push to increase deportations on orders from President Donald Trump appeared to be wreaking havoc on a complex international prosecution that had been tied up for a year in extradition proceedings.
“Indeed, it is both preposterous and offensive for the government to bring someone into the United States against their will and then turn around and seek ICE detention because that person is here ‘illegally,’” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said in the written order. “The government needs to decide what its priorities are: ginning up deportation stats or prosecuting alleged criminals.”
If Kafka were alive, he might be an advisor to the Trump White House.
AI is freaking me out. AI-generated fake stories and videos are flooding the Net. The boundaries between fact and fiction are dissolving like that cake left out in the rain.
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You can’t trust any videos or stories posted from random accounts without backing up to see if they are as phony as Pete Hegseth.
Secretary Hegseth’s Department of Defense is all in on AI. And just in time for it to screw with him (The New Republic):
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled his department’s new AI chatbot for military personnel, GenAI.mil. Almost immediately, the bot called a “hypothetical” situation where the government orders a strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat and then double-taps said boat to kill the survivors, “unambiguously illegal.”
A military source who spoke to Straight Arrow News Wednesday pointed reporters to a Reddit thread that featured the alleged interaction with the bot. The source said that military personnel wasted no time in testing the bot’s capabilities.
“At least someone—or something?—in the Trump administration has moral clarity,” writes TNR’s Rachel Kahn.
But who the hell is Straight Arrow News and is that image from Reddit real? SAN claims an unnamed source gave a similar prompt to GenAI.mil and got the same response. The Pentagon Press Operations had no comment as of Tuesday, so AI has not take over there yet. They’re probably overwhelmed with trying to cover Hegseth’s ass over the murder of helpless survivors of his first missile attack on their boat.
