Oops! 😮 Judge Rules Trump's Prosecutor Wasn't Allowed to Prosecute Anyone

Indictments against Comey and James dismissed. Plus: Who let the DOGE out? MAGA Nation goes global. Senators say Russia wrote Trump's Ukraine plan. And News That Doesn't Suck for spiders.

First Lady Melania Trump welcomes the 2025 White House Christmas tree, a 25-foot Concolor fir grown in Michigan, on November 24, 2025. Perhaps she’s changed since her husband’s first term, when she was taped complaining, “Who gives a f*** about the Christmas stuff.… But I need to do it, right?”

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I remain dumbfounded that Thanksgiving is this week. So I did some research into the following questions: Does time fly because I’m older? Because life is faster than it used to be? Because we live inside screens that don’t know day from night?

The answer, apparently, is YES.

There’s proportional theory. When you’re 10, a year is 10% of your life. At 40, it’s 2.5%. Each year becomes a smaller slice of your total experience.

Then there’s the brain. According to the experts, the hippocampus needs focused attention to form long-term memories. Our online life makes that harder. We jump from text to alert to Zoom to notification. Multitasking fragments attention, so we encode fewer distinct memories. Which, I deduce, contributes to the feeling that time is passing faster. (Fewer memories means the perception of less time passing, right?) I know this much: When I’m scrolling Instagram, I genuinely cannot tell if I’ve been there three minutes or thirty.

Finally, the well-documented part: Novel experiences create more memory markers, making time feel slower in retrospect. Our daily routines — news, work, Zoom, dog, dinner, repeat — don’t get encoded in detail. I guess our brains are efficient that way.

So here’s one trick: Commit to small novelties. Walk somewhere new. Try that restaurant you’ve driven past for years. Learn something. (A friend swears by her language learning app these days. Says it’s the most stimulating part of her day.)

The trick isn’t to slow time. It’s to make it feel richer. To mark it. Because the days are long but the years really are short, and the only way to hold onto them is to pay attention.

These are my conclusions. There are scientists, researchers, therapists in this audience who know far more than I do. Please share your thoughts (or correct mine) in the comments!

You’re here for news, not life advice. So here’s today: A federal judge tossed the charges against Comey and Letitia James — turns out loyalty hires still need credentials. Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’s retiring, and some GOP colleagues sound jealous. X switched on location tracking and exposed MAGA accounts based overseas. The Pentagon says Sen. Mark Kelly undermined command authority — for quoting the law. The FAA dropped airline compensation and asked passengers to clean up instead. Plus: News That Doesn’t Suck.

Here Are Your Headlines

• Case(s) Dismissed: A federal judge on Monday dismissed the administration’s indictments against James Comey and Letitia James. The judge concluded that Trump’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan to the role overseeing these cases “was invalid,” and therefore “all actions flowing” from that decision — including the indictments — “were unlawful exercises of executive power.” The White House said the DOJ will appeal the decision “very soon.”

  • Pattern: Halligan is far from the only interim US Attorney appointed by Trump despite having no prosecutorial experience and serving without Senate confirmation. There are 93 US attorney offices, but Trump has managed just two Senate-confirmed US attorneys. In some cases, his candidates’ confirmation was blocked by Democrats; in others, their lack of experience and blatant pro-Trump partisanship meant even a GOP-controlled Senate wouldn’t confirm them. Alina Habba, for example, is investigating Democrats politicians in New Jersey as the state’s interim US attorney, despite having had no prosecutorial experience and facing ongoing legal challenges to her continued authority.

• Back and Forth: Officials from the US and Ukraine have made significant changes to Trump’s 28-point plan to end the war, altering or removing several of the most pro-Russia provisions. Trump, after complaining on Sunday that “UKRAINE ‘LEADERSHIP’ HAS EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS,” on Monday morning changed his tune, writing that “something good just may be happening.” Here’s the latest.

  • Whose Plan Is It Anyway? Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) on Saturday said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told them (and other lawmakers) the original 28-point plan was authored by Russia, not the US. Some, including Sen. Rounds, even suggested the plan was originally written in Russian. Rubio and the State Department rejected these claims.

  • No Good: Russia on Monday rejected Europe’s own, amended version of the 28-point plan, calling it “completely unconstructive.”

  • Long Way To Go: Leaders across Europe welcomed progress but stressed that much still needs to be done. Germany’s leader, for example, said he doesn’t “expect a breakthrough this week.” Case in point: Russia on Monday warned that some of the provisions in the original plan (which, remember, was widely condemned for being extremely pro-Russia) are unacceptable and in need of further discussions.

  • Round Three: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy may visit Trump later this week.

• DOGE Is Dead, Long Live DOGE: The Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded, despite Trump’s original executive order decreeing it would last through July 2026. That doesn’t mean its work is done; key officials have been moved to other agencies and organizations, and the Office of Personnel Management has inherited many of DOGE’s functions.

  • Good Boy: DOGE’s achievements include removing hundreds of thousands of federal workers; weakening or eliminating 11 federal agencies, including USAID; terminating thousands of contracts and grants; and accessing, potentially leaking, and consolidating Americans’ personal data into massive databases. All of this has put the sensitive information of millions of people at risk and could cause some 14 million people worldwide to lose their lives. DOGE claims to have saved the US government $160 billion, just 8% what it promised — while government spending has increased since Trump took office again.

• Big Brother Is Watching: The Pentagon on Monday announced an investigation of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for “serious allegations of misconduct.” In case you forgot, that alleged misconduct was a video recorded by Kelly and five other lawmakers reminding military personnel they “can refuse illegal orders.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday accused the “Seditious Six,” as he called the lawmakers, of pushing troops to “ignore the orders of their Commanders.” (Is Hegseth admitting that commanders are giving or will give illegal orders?) The Pentagon warned Hegseth could recall Kelly, a retired Navy pilot, back to active duty for punishment, including court martial.

• Goodbye: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said she will retire at the end of her term in January. She posted an explosive statement slamming party leadership for abandoning MAGA priorities and abetting general dysfunction in government, frustrations apparently shared by many of her colleagues. If you think she’s an outlier, seems you’d be wrong. In fact, some Republican lawmakers are telling DC media that MTG may be the first of several resignations; one senior representative told Punchbowl News that the “entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage.” Because of this “arrogance” and refusal to “allow little wins,” the lawmaker said, “morale has never been lower. [House Speaker] Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and [the GOP] will lose the majority before this term is out.” What are MTG’s plans? She denied a report that she plans to run for president. Worth noting that among her reasons for resigning: threats against her family, a concern shared by other members of Congress.

• Declaration of… The Trump administration has officially designated Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro and his allies as members of a foreign terrorist organization, Cartel de los Soles. As we previously noted, some experts argue the “Cartel of the Suns” isn’t a discrete organization, but rather a term describing general criminal infiltration of Venezuela’s government. (Venezuela called the group “non-existent.”) The terrorist designation gives the US military more options for striking within Venezuela, something 70% of Americans oppose. It follows the US conducting its largest show of force near Venezuela ever and warning major airlines of a “potentially hazardous situation” over the country.

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Today’s headlines on Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles — now labeled a terrorist group by the Trump administration — tell two different stories. Some outlets call it a drug cartel; others, like the Washington Examiner, insist it isn’t one at all. Different audiences are getting different facts, which helps explain our polarized views. I track that using Ground News’ app and website, which gather coverage across the political spectrum so I can stay up to date with stories that are underreported.

I like to use Ground News because you can:

• See the full picture: Compare how left, center, and right outlets cover the same story.

• Spot blind spots: Identify what one side isn’t reporting.

As part of the News Not Noise community, you can get 40% off their all-access Vantage subscription. To subscribe, go to groundnews.com/NNN.

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• X Marks the Spot: Elon Musk’s X launched a new feature this weekend that displays users’ locations — exposing several prominent far-right accounts, purporting to be American, as actually being based elsewhere. The popular account “MAGANATIONX,” for example, is based in Eastern Europe. Multiple accounts claiming to be Trump-supporting American women are based in Thailand. One account with the username “@American” is based in Pakistan. And what about “The General,” whose bio reads: “Constitutionalist, Patriot 🇺🇸, Ethnically American, Colonial Stock 1620?” Based in Turkey. It’s no surprise foreign actors are flooding U.S. politics with polarizing content. What is surprising is that social media platforms already had clear proof — and didn’t sound the alarm.

• Battle Continues: The Supreme Court temporarily blocked a lower court’s ruling that Texas’ gerrymandered voting map likely discriminated based on race. The Justices are considering how to address the case; a group of voters suing to block the new map on Monday argued it “may be the clearest direct evidence of racial gerrymandering ever to land at this court’s feet.”

• Artificial Restrictions: The White House has put on hold an unsigned executive order that would attempt to prevent states from regulating AI after facing bipartisan backlash. This follows Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) revealing last week that GOP leaders are considering slipping legislation preventing states from regulating AI into the National Defense Authorization Act, which Democrats quickly warned they would block. In July, the Senate voted 99–1 to remove a similar AI preemption provision from the Big Beautiful Bill. According to a new poll, Americans oppose AI preemption by a margin of 3 to 1.

Keep reading for headlines covering:

• Why the transportation secretary halted a plan to give delayed airline passengers cash (and what he’s doing instead)

• The White House’s mysterious plan to solve health care

• The secret of the world’s largest spider web

• How a groundbreaking micro-robot could save stroke victims (and much more)

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