At Least 22 Dem AGs Agreed to Coordinate Takedown of Trump

State Attorney General Rob Bonta has joined 82 lawsuits against President Donald Trump's administration since his January 2025 inauguration. (Myung J. Chun - Los Angeles Times / Getty Images)At Least 22 Dem AGs Agreed to Coordinate Takedown of Trump
, Keep Public in Dark Going Into 2024 Election
By V. Saxena August 10, 2026 at 10:56am


At least 22 Democratic attorneys general signed an ominous “common interest agreement” document before President Donald Trump’s 2024 election, vowing to pursue lawfare against Trump’s future administration.

The document outlined a lawfare campaign that would become known as the “Project for Federal Accountability,” according to The Center Square.

The document was reportedly signed three months before former President Joe Biden exited the 2024 presidential race to make room for then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

The “Project for Federal Accountability” was later referenced in then-New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s budget in early 2025, according to Zach Blackburn of the National Journal Hotline. Murphy is a Democrat. So was his attorney general, Matt Platkin.

As noted by Blackburn in the post above published to the social media website X, Murphy refused to “mention” the “Project for Federal Accountability” while publicly unveiling his budget in February of 2025. This appeared to be no coincidence.
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“The majority of attorneys general who signed the agreement have declined to comment or answer questions” about it, according to The Center Square.

“Some have downplayed the timing of the agreement or otherwise minimized the extent to which they had been preparing for litigation against the Trump Administration,” the outlet further reported.

Yet despite their attempts to downplay or even hide the agreement, their lawfare against President Trump’s administration has been clear, with the AGs having sued the admin nearly 100 times since Inauguration Day.

Of the 100 suits, California Attorney General Rob Bonta has joined 82 of them, and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser has joined at least 75 of them. Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown has joined 70 of them, and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has joined 46 of them.

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In a post published to X after The Center Square’s report dropped, former GOP national spokesperson Madison Gesiotto Gilbert alleged that this joint lawfare effort “was about nullifying the voters” in the 2024 presidential election.

Democrat attorneys general have also reportedly used their joint planned lawfare to fundraise for their campaigns, according to Former Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who used to be a Republican but now votes for Democrats.

“I get lots of emails from people running for attorney general, lots of texts and emails saying, ‘We’ve got to stop President Trump’ or ‘We’ve got to work together as state attorneys general. That’s why you need to give me money!'” Shurtleff told The Center Square.

Bonta, for his part, defended his lawfare during a news conference Tuesday, alleging that the lawsuits he’s filed or participated in have all been “apolitical.”

“If [Trump] doesn’t want to get sued, all he has to do is follow the law,” Bonta said during the news conference. “I don’t think our cases are likely to be dismissed … Trump shows no sign of slowing down, so we will continue to sue him.”

Arizona Attorney General Mayes has also attempted to downplay the lawfare and, more specifically, the document from 2024.

“There is nothing particularly significant about that date,” Richie Taylor, Mayes’ communications director, told The Center Square. “The office has common interest agreements with Republican AGs as well as Democratic AGs, depending on the litigation.”

Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown admitted to The Center Square that he and other AGs started planning lawfare “as soon as it was clear that Trump was going to get the nomination.”

“We’re pleased that we responded before January 2025,” he added. “We talked through a host of possibilities, and we wanted to be prepared, not to get caught off guard.”

NOW THAT THE FLOCK CAMERAS ARE ON THEIR WAY OUT I'M SURE I'LL SLEEP BETTER sic, sic, sic

 

What Difference Does It Make

 

THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE BUREAU OF EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL AFFAIRS

I should probably explain...

They presented this to me just for showing a guy from Moldova how to mass produce chocolate bars.

Dead Woman’s Sentence Is Commuted to Life in Prison

 

A Dead Woman’s Sentence Is Commuted to Life in Prison. Justice or Farce?

10 Jul 2026 

 

Austin Sarat

Posted in: Courts and Procedure

On July 8, England’s Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, David Lammy, informed his colleagues in the House of Commons that King Charles had granted a conditional pardon to a woman who was executed on July 13, 1955. The beneficiary of the King’s posthumous mercy was Ruth Ellis, who, as a report in the Guardian notes, “was the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom.”

Ellis had been convicted and sentenced to death when she was twenty-eight years old for murdering her lover, David Blakely, whom she met while working in a nightclub. During her trial, Ellis, who had been married before and who was the mother of two children, stated, “It was obvious that when I shot him I intended to kill him.”

Not surprisingly, Ellis’s trial attracted massive press interest. As Monash University’s Sue Tweg explained in an article about the trial, “The press provided sensationalized accounts of what night-club life was like, for the benefit of the vast majority of Britons in an exhausted, impoverished, and repressed postwar society who hadn’t much idea about night-clubs anyway.… Undeterred by facts, and anticipating plenty of copy from the lengthy trial which failed to materialize, journalists established and spiced up the morality play angle of Ellis’s story.”

But, Tweg notes, there was another side to the story.

Ellis “allowed herself to be arrested without resistance, confessed at once, and appeared hardly aware of what was happening. She tried to keep up appearances at her trial, but fatally misjudged how her freshly peroxided hair and painted nails would be interpreted by a conservative middle-class jury at the Old Bailey, clearly alienated by such a show of vulgarity.”

Tweg adds that “Having exploited the sordid side of Ruth Ellis’s image during her trial, some newspapers played up her end as romantic melodrama, constructing her death as ‘death wish.’ Such a reading was supported by the ‘chin-up’ heroic tone of Ellis’s last letters to friends from prison, in which she claimed she was satisfied to be dying for her lover.”

However, only later did it become clear that Ellis had suffered serious abuse by Blakely. As the Guardian reports, “According to accounts from Ellis, her friends, doctors and witnesses, she was assaulted in public, pushed down stairs, struck so hard on the ear she was briefly rendered deaf, caused to miscarry after being punched in the stomach, left bruised, and threatened with murder.”

Still, a posthumous exercise of the Royal Prerogative is an extraordinary and rare occurrence. And a commutation leaving a sentence of life in prison for an already dead person seems absurd, even if motivated by a desire to redress an historical wrong.

The passage of seven decades might have merited more mercy than that.

Still, it is important to recognize that only a few other people have received posthumous clemency from the British Monarch, with a couple receiving full pardons.

In 1966, Queen Elizabeth II pardoned Timothy Evans sixteen years after he was hanged for murdering his daughter, a crime he did not commit. Here clemency was really an act of justice, setting an innocent man free from the shame that he did not rightly deserve.

In 2003, the British Home Office went one better, compensating the Evans family financially for the miscarriage of justice in his case.

The Queen issued another posthumous clemency in 2013, this time to Alan Turing, a World War II hero who was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952 for homosexual activity. According to the BBC, Turing “had been arrested after having an affair with a 19-year-old Manchester man. The conviction meant he lost his security clearance and had to stop the code-cracking work that had proved vital to the Allies in World War Two.”

Justice Secretary Chris Grayling described what happened to Turing this way: “[W]e would now consider [his conviction and punishment] unjust and discriminatory…. Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man.”

Following the Queen’s posthumous pardon of Turing, the British Parliament passed legislation purging posthumously the criminal records of thousands of men who had been convicted of homosexual acts that were, in 2017, no longer criminalized. At the time, Sam Gyimah, then Justice Minister, called what the Parliament did “truly momentous.”

He added, “We can never undo the hurt caused, but we have apologised and taken action to right these wrongs. I am immensely proud that ‘Turing’s law’ has become a reality under this government.”

In between Queen Elizabeth’s two full, posthumous pardons, she issued a conditional pardon to Derek Bentley, who was put to death in 1953 for his involvement in a murder. As the BBC tells it, “In 1952 Derek Bentley, a 19-year-old…was caught burgling a warehouse in London with a friend, Chris Craig. Craig was carrying a gun and Bentley carried a sheath knife and knuckleduster. When the police arrived to arrest both men, Bentley shouted ‘Let him have it, Chris’ and Craig fired the gun” killing a police officer.

“Bentley and Craig,” it continues, “were both charged with murder under a charge of joint enterprise. Bentley faced the death penalty if found guilty, but Craig did not because he was under the age of 18.” But, as in the Ellis case, there was more to the story.

At the time of his crime, Bentley had epilepsy, was cognitively impaired, and was illiterate. And almost immediately after his conviction, Bentley’s family began to try to clear his name. And a 1991 film, Let Him Have It, kept his case in the public eye.

All that set the stage for the posthumous clemency that set aside Bentley’s death sentence. And five years later, his conviction was overturned on the grounds that the trial judge had given erroneous jury instructions.

Like Evans and Turing, Bentley was not required “to serve” a lesser sentence from the grave. That is the fate that presently awaits Ruth Ellis.

As the Ministry of Justice explained on Wednesday, “The application for a pardon was brought by four of Ruth Ellis’s grandchildren. The application presented that her responsibility was profoundly shaped by domestic abuse, trauma and circumstances that were never properly recognised at her trial.”

“Lingering questions about her criminal actions, the handling of her trial, and her execution,” it went on, “helped to bring about the greatest change in criminal law the British judicial system had hitherto countenanced—the abolition of the mandatory death penalty for murder.”

Echoing what Gyimah said in 2017, on Wednesday, David Lammy told his parliamentary colleagues: “We cannot change what happened 70 years ago. But we can recognise that this was an exceptional case. Today’s conditional pardon is an act of mercy. We hope it brings some measure of peace to Ruth’s family.”

by Storm'n Norm'n

However, it seems less about mercy than about justice. Ruth Ellis certainly deserved to have had the injustice of her sentence recognized, as the King did.

But mercy properly understood asks for something more, a reckoning that gives to those who receive it more than they deserve. And while I applaud what the King did in Ellis’s case, he did not give her that something more.

Posted in: Courts and Procedure, International Law

Tags: pardon, United Kingdom