Seth Abramson Profile picture
May 20, 2019 4 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Yes it can, if it finds direct contempt. You could argue that a federal court can't find direct contempt on a Congressional subpoena, but even then the federal court would set a hearing date and would order the Marshals to arrest McGahn if he didn't appear. It's not a civil case.
1/ The problem with saying a federal court *won't enforce* a Congressional subpoena is that it means a Congressional subpoena has *no force of law* behind it, as Congress has *no recourse to the courts*, but instead must *restart the process* in the courts if someone defies them.
2/ Your argument, @rossgarber, is the only way for Congressional subpoenas to have force of law is if Congress establishes its own judicial action via inherent contempt, which hasn't been used for 89 years. You're saying Congressional subpoenas have been meaningless for 89 years.
@rossgarber 3/ Obviously that's nonsense. Congressional subpoenas, like any subpoenas, are enforceable through the judicial branch, and when a legally issued subpoena is not honored, the judicial branch orders the executive branch to assist it in compelling the subpoena recipient's presence.

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More from @SethAbramson

Jan 17
I shouldn't even have to say this, but precisely *no one* in the independent journalism sphere is saying that Trump can *legally* cancel the midterms.

So corporate media should put on its thinking cap and ask themselves what independent journalists *are* saying.

Yes.... *that*.
It's Month 1 of a 10-month plan and they're already illegally invading countries, illegally occupying U.S. cities, posting Nazi memes from government accounts almost daily, and publicly saying there should be no elections anymore. You think their plan is to do *anything* legally?
So I've no idea why corporate media keeps sanctimoniously reminding us of something we already know—that Trump can't *legally* cancel elections. Because that's not where the debate or mystery is now. The question is whether he thinks he can wait until 2028 to declare martial law.
Read 9 tweets
Jan 15
The question media should be asking: if Minneapolis only needs 600 police officers to perform all general law enforcement activities in the city, why did Trump send 3,000 federal agents to execute a statutorily and constitutionally *much* smaller task?

Answer? He wanted a *war*.
Based on the size of the task and authority ICE actually has—merely executing judicial warrants for already-identified undocumented persons—we'd expect an ICE "surge" in Minneapolis to be about 100 agents.

Trump sent *30 times that*.

Because he wants to declare an insurrection.
So if you're an American paying only small attention to Minneapolis and wondering why things are crazy there, imagine *your* town being the target of an *unprecedented* federal op.

Big deal, right?

Now imagine the feds sending *30 times* too many men—most *virtually untrained*.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 6
(🧵) THREAD: There’s no purpose in debating Trump supporters on Venezuela. They lack the background to participate in a coherent conversation. Do they know Trump is backing a socialist despot over a capitalist who won the 2024 election by 34 points? No.

It gets worse from there.
1/ People without principles, like MAGAs, desperately alight on random anecdotes to try to “prove” points—as they don’t know how to *actually* prove a point, make an argument, hold a consistent position, marshal evidence, or maintain logical throughlines across diverse scenarios.
2/ So for instance, they’ll tell you that the justness of what Trump did is “proven” by how some Venezuelans reacted to it. But these are the same folks whose political ideology has long been grounded in denying international law and the sovereignty or interests of other nations.
Read 19 tweets
Jan 4
This is the tip of the iceberg.

As detailed in 2020 bestseller Proof of Corruption, Trump used Erik Prince, Rudy Giuliani and a megadonor to launch clandestine negotiations in Venezuela that would've effectuated some version of the deal. America is being lied to every which way. Image
What the NYT-bestselling Proof Series has shown—across 2,500 pages and over 15,000 reliable major media citations from around the world—is that what we think of as many different scandals is *one* scandal: the Trump-Russia Scandal. Ukraine, Israel, KSA, Venezuela... even Epstein.
The Trump-Russia Scandal, as a research topic, is so vast—it covers so many continents, decades, and scandals in various nations—that we can analogize being a scholar of it to being a scholar of the Cold War or the Gilded Age.

We keep speaking of trees without seeing the forest.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 3
So blowing up the dead body of the man Trump deliriously claims stole the 2020 presidential election from him was part of a *law enforcement operation* targeting an entirely different leader? Pull the other leg now.
en.apa.az/america/us-str…
It was almost exactly six years ago that Trump told us he thirsted to destroy key foreign cultural sites just to desecrate them and was told in reply—unambiguously—that this was a war crime.

Today he apparently bombed a culturally significant *mausoleum*. bbc.com/news/world-mid…
Corporate media appears to be under-reporting or not reporting the mausoleum strike—a media victory for Trump because it at once hides a war crime, hides a fact that debunks Trump’s claims of this being a law enforcement op, and hides a key Venezuelan justification for vengeance.
Read 6 tweets
Dec 27, 2025
This anodyne BS is how the NYT summarizes the most corrupt presidency in US history.

Trump said he didn't know what Project 2025 was; he lied.

He said he would get prices down; he lied.

He said he'd only deport criminals; he lied.

He started wars and attacked his own people. Image
He destroyed the White House. He took bribes. He pardoned monsters. He grifted taxpayers and investors out of billions. He covered up pedophilia. He committed war crimes. He enabled genocide. He savaged federal agencies. He engaged in stochastic terrorism. He simped for the rich.
He cut off student loan forgiveness. He did special business favors for the CCP. He destroyed small farms. His tariffs constituted the largest tax increase on Americans in decades. He told thousands of lies in public. He hid major medical issues. He spread racist disinformation.
Read 7 tweets

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