White House Warns Conservative Groups They’re Being Monitored

After a disastrous midterm showing that placed the future of the MAGA movement in abject peril, the White House decided it was a good time to let conservative groups know that they were being watched. A Thursday memo from the White House Office of Public Liaison sent to about 3,000 conservative organizations listed a series of Trump accomplishments, vowing that a Democratic Congress wouldn’t reverse them, according to The Wall Street Journal. But the memo ended with one sentence highlighted in yellow: “As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations.” “‘We’re watching you’ is not the message the White House should be sending,” Caroline Sunshine, a White House aide during Trump’s first term, wrote online. “We’re LISTENING to you is what anyone in the WH who has the President’s best interest should be saying.”Earlier emails from the White House office didn’t include language about “monitoring” groups, according to a review by the Journal. The shift comes as a flurry of conservative voices, from commentator Matt Walsh, to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to Vice President JD Vance himself, have lambasted President Trump’s policies and decision-making—placing sole blame on him for Republicans’ midterm election loss. And while the office told The Wall Street Journal that it wasn’t a threat, this is an ominous message to send to a coalition that is actively fracturing. The Trump administration admitted Thursday that it has done work on the president’s planned 250-foot arch in Washington, D.C., in defiance of a court order. In a court filing, DOJ lawyers acknowledged that a construction firm contracted by the White House, Grunley Construction Company, had painted lines in Memorial Circle, where President Trump wants his triumphal arch to be built. In their filing, they said that the company would stop its work and provide advance notice before resuming “any future work related to the project,” as they did not have permission from the National Park Service.Meanwhile, the National Capital Planning Commission is expected to vote to approve the arch Thursday evening, and the administration wants to start work immediately after approval. Almost 1,000 pages of public comments have been submitted to the commission opposing the project, and three lawsuits have been filed to stop the arch from being built.Veterans groups say the arch’s large size would hurt Arlington National Cemetery by casting a large shadow over it, which the Trump administration even acknowledges. However, it says the gargantuan monument should be built anyway.Trump wants his arch badly, and he has openly expressed disdain for court orders against him in the past. After Republicans got a historic thumping in the midterm elections, it would not be surprising if Trump decides to blaze on ahead and try to build his arch quickly before the Democratic majority is sworn in and tries to stop him.Republican Representative Thomas Massie says he has enough support to force a vote on his second Epstein Transparency Act.“When we return next week, we’ll get 218 signatures for Epstein Files Transparency Act II, which guarantees a vote,” Massie wrote Thursday on X. “Survivors will be able to get their own records, State Attorneys General can prosecute crimes, and we can take the DOJ to court for keeping critical files hidden.”Massie, who has made an enemy of Trump by opposing the Iran war and pushing for the full release of the Epstein files, first passed the Epstein Transparency Act in November 2025. And though President Trump signed it into law, Massie, Democrats, and a few Republicans argue that his administration didn’t fully abide with what the act required.“The Department of Justice has flagrantly and consistently ignored EFTA’s disclosure requirements,” Massie wrote earlier this summer in his announcement of the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, co-sponsored by Democratic Senators Ben Ray Luján and Jeff Merkley, and Democratic Representatives Ro Khanna and Teresa Leger Fernández.“The Department of Justice continues to unlawfully withhold over 3 million Epstein files that should be released to the public,” he continued. “In addition, the DOJ is unlawfully maintaining heavy redactions on the files it is releasing. State attorneys general and victims should have the right to sue the Attorney General of the United States to compel compliance with a transparency law President Trump signed.”House Democrats are coming for law firms that cut deals with President Donald Trump. Speaking on MS NOW Wednesday night, Representative Jamie Raskin, who is poised to become chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said that the several law firms that struck deals with Trump could expect to receive subpoenas next year. In the early days of Trump’s second term, the president issued several executive orders revoking the security clearance of and threatening to pull all federal contracts from large law firms that had supported clients and causes he felt were contrary to his agenda. In response, nine firms agreed to degrading deals that gutted their work on certain policy areas such as immigration, ended company DEI programs, and required them to provide pro bono legal work for Trump’s administration. Altogether, the deals signed with the president amounted to nearly $1 billion worth of free legal work.“There are major law firms in America, including Paul Weiss, that have capitulated to these coercive tactics from Donald Trump and have basically surrendered and made all sorts of outrageous concessions,” Raskin said on MS NOW. Trump’s executive order had targeted Paul Weiss over the work of Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who previously oversaw the Manhattan district attorney’s office’s investigation into Trump’s alleged financial crimes. As part of bowing to Trump’s threat, the firm acknowledged that Pomerantz had committed wrongdoing, and agreed to stop making decisions about hiring and promotions based on considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion.The current ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, Raskin had requested information from several firms about the exact details of their agreements; the answers they provided indicated that the president may have gotten the short end of the stick. While the firms had reportedly agreed to provide millions of dollars of pro bono work for specific causes, many asserted that they had total authority over the selection of their clients. A group of Democratic lawmakers sent another series of letters to law firms earlier this year, warning that the Trump administration’s scheme to use “coercive and illegal measures” to blackmail firms could potentially violate federal laws against bribery, defrauding the public, and even racketeering. Read more about the deals:Roy Cooper won North Carolina’s Senate seat before the polls even opened on Election Day.The number of early votes cast for the Democratic nominee totaled more than 1,728,000, besting the total number of votes cast overall for his Republican opponent, Michael Whatley, by roughly 85,000 votes, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections. By the time the polls closed, Whatley received 1,643,000 votes, while Cooper received nearly 2,468,000 in total.Cooper managed to flip the seat blue, helping the national caucus obtain a majority in the upper chamber. He will replace outbound North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, who announced his retirement earlier this year.Speaking to a crowd at his victory party in Raleigh on Tuesday, Cooper pledged to orient his focus in Washington toward affordability and ending the war in Iran.“I am still a prisoner of hope,” Cooper said. “I truly believe that our best days lie ahead, that we can make the course correction that our great country so badly needs. That North Carolina and the United States have a future teeming with possibilities.”Cooper previously served as the Tar Heel State’s governor from 2017 to 2025, but his election on Tuesday was just one component of a blue wave that swept over the historic battleground state. Despite a gerrymandered map that was intended to give Republicans a steep advantage on Tuesday, Democrats gained at least five House seats and are projected to win a sixth. Five districts in the state have yet to report their final vote counts, but so far, Republicans have won zero seats. (Current forecasts estimate they will win four.)Read more about early voting: