Welcome to the online edition of From The Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that provides the latest reports and analysis from the NBC News Politics team’s White House, Capitol Hill and Campaign Trail.
Today’s edition explores the background of a judge who portrays the rage of President Donald Trump and his allies in recent times. Furthermore, Andrea Mitchell explains that you should not expect to learn from the JFK file.
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– Adam Walner
Meet the judge who portrays Trump’s rage
Ryan J. Reilly, Eric Ortiz, Lawrence Hurley, Alan Smith
The targets of federal judges in conflict with the White House over immigration enforcement and currently President Donald Trump’s call for ammo each is a bipartisan appointee, including cases in which he supported Trump during his three-year career in Washington, D.C.
Since 2023, Supreme Court Judge James Boasberg of the District of Columbia U.S. District Court, elicited Trump’s rage after temporarily blocking the administration’s efforts to carry out weekend deportation of migrants by plane under rarely used wartime laws.
In an interview aired on Fox News on Tuesday, Trump said he would fire each of Boasberg, whom he had made as a “local judge.” Trump previously branded him “radical left-hand man, troublemaker, agitator” in a social media post, seeking Boasberg’s blast each.
Boasberg and anyone who knows his records claim that he is nothing.
In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Boasberg as a quasi-judge for the DC Superior Court. In 2011, President Barack Obama elected him to the District of Columbia US District Court judge, and was confirmed by the Senate by a 96-0 vote.
A Washington lawyer who frequently appeared before Boasberg, 62, called him a “very conscientious” judge, promised to be “very central” and get things right.
“He is known to be a great judge between his lawyer and his colleagues,” the lawyer said.
Read more →
Related: Judge warns “consequences” after DOJ pushes back questions about deportation flights, Gary Grunbach, Megan Lebowitz and Dare Gregorian
Things you need to know from today’s President Trump
The Trump administration and Ukrainian President Voldimia Zelensky said Ukraine agreed to proceed with a partial ceasefire between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discusses a day ago. Moscow and Kiev denounced each other overnight aerial attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure. A federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from enlisting or serving in the military. The U.S. Peace Institute, an independent nonprofit organization founded by Congress 40 years ago, asked federal judges to immediately block attempts to force shut down the Department of Government Efficiency organization. The administration is considering abandoning the NATO command, which has been in the US since Eisenhower. Trump fired two Democrat commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission. This week, workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experienced a type of whiplash as the federal government tried to revive fired probation workers.
Follow the live update →
reveal what the JFK file does and doesn’t
By Andrea Mitchell
Scholars and conspiracy theorists have experienced unpublished PDFs of the past 24 hours, including unreadable handwritten notes from the FBI and CIA regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In part, spurred by his own affinity for the assassination of conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Kennedy, Trump signed the executive order at the inauguration on the fourth day, releasing documents up to 80,000 pages from the National Archives JFK file, a process that began Tuesday evening. When he visited the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts this week, Trump took over as chairman, who told reporters, “You got a lot of reading.”
What has been delivered so far is far inferior to promises. Many of the pages released include testimony and tax returns from the Great Ju Court, but the information is still compiled. None of the documents were cataloged or annotated. Also, much of what was included on the page was already known from other sources.
The documents included a surveillance report on Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union and Finland. He spent his months in Mexico City leading up to his assassination and anger at Kennedy when he was denied a visa to Cuba, where he wanted to escape.
And there’s a fascinating new material about the secret CIA operations in New York City during the Cold War, opening half a million letters and packages a month between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Will the release of the JFK file finally resolve over 60 years of doubt about the Warren Report’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone? That’s not the case.
Experts like Larry Sabbat at the University of Virginia said the CIA withheld other National Archives documents that were not covered by the release of the Trump Order. Other materials, including Oswald’s FBI surveillance records, have been destroyed.
“I think Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shot. I think all the evidence is heading in that direction. The question of never being fully answered is whether he received any kind of encouragement or support from other agents, other organizations,” Sabato said. “These documents do not rule out that possibility. If anything, they provide fuel for the fire.”
JFK’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, added a ferocious commentary on all of this to X, posting a sharp criticism of Trump’s policies, accusing him of “I’m obsessed with my grandfather, not what he achieved with his life or what he achieved with it.”
Poll: Are you planning to sift through the JFK file? Voting below:
today’s other top stories
The collapse of the stop fire: Israeli forces have launched a new ground operation in the Gaza Strip after breaking a two-month ceasefire in a vast bombing campaign that killed hundreds of people throughout the Enclave. Read More → ❌Fact Check: Elon Musk relies on false claims related to undocumented immigration and voter fraud to drive the Social Security Agency’s cuts. Read more → 👀2026 Watch: Florida Goff. Ron DeSantis’ political team is urging state lobbyists not to support Trump-backed Byron Donald’s bid for governor, as they believe Casey DeSantis is on the run. Read more → 🙈 Blind Watchdog: House leaders have yet to appoint a board to the office of the Congressional Ethics Watchdog, but have not left them helpless. Read more →⚾Faculty of History: An attempt to wipe out government websites including diversity equity and inclusion led to the Department of Defense to nix the page about the military career of baseball legend Jackie Robinson. Read more → 📊Survey: More voters say they think administrative agencies and courts have too much power. According to a new NBC News poll, changes over the past six years have been driven primarily by democratic voters. Read more →
For now, it’s all from the political desk. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner and Bridget Bowman.
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