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U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, a Republican appointee, permanently blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting the law firm Jenner & Block, finding the retribution unconstitutional.

The order, issued Friday afternoon, alleged that Trump was trying “to chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the Executive Branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers."

Trump targeted the law firm, citing lawyer Andrew Weissmann, a top prosecutor who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller's team that investigated Trump and his connections to Russia in the 2016 election. Weissmann hadn't worked for the firm since 2011 and has been teaching at New York University Law School.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

The executive order attempted to kill any government contracts with the firm and block any of the firm's lawyers from accessing federal buildings like courthouses.

Jenner & Block isn't the only firm Trump targeted. He's gone after several, and nine of them struck a deal with him to give nearly $1 billion in free legal services to allied Trump causes.

This is the second time a court has struck down Trump's target of a law firm. The others involved include Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey, all of which filed suits in federal court. Judges in all four cases have issued temporary blocks to enforce the executive orders.

Read the order here.

Dairy farmers who voted for President Donald Trump are worried there will be no one around to milk the cows now that the administration is cracking down on "otherwise law-abiding immigrants in the country illegally," The Boston Globe reported.

Farmers in Vermont told the Globe they voted for Trump because they liked his tough talk on quelling immigration and closing the border. Things are different now that ICE is coming for their workers.

“All the dairy farmers who voted for Trump were under the impression they weren’t going to come on farms and take our guys,” one farmer said. “It’s happening more than we’d like. It’s scaring the farming community and we’re like, ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen.’”

According to the report, "Farm owners and workers alike in this agricultural region near the Canadian border have been on edge in the month since U.S. Border Patrol officers detained eight Mexican men on Vermont’s largest dairy operation, Pleasant Valley Farms."

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

The report said that four of the men taken into custody have since been deported.

"Federal immigration authorities say they are not targeting Vermont’s $3.6 billion dairy industry, which is responsible for 63 percent of the milk produced in New England," the report said. "But the recent arrests are prompting some in the sector to wonder how it would survive without its undocumented labor force."

The report quoted Vermont's Secretary of Agriculture as saying, "I think our farmers are concerned about the well-being of their workers. That’s foremost. They’re also concerned if (the workforce) was to go away, who’s going to do the work? Who’s going to milk the cows?”

Read The Boston Globe article here.

Retailers are likely to raise prices "in the coming weeks" due to President Donald Trump's tariffs, according to a report in The New York Post.

Business editor and Fox correspondent Charles Gasparino wrote Friday, "The retail industry is alerting President Trump that they can’t 'eat' his tariffs forever – and price increases are likely to hit in the coming weeks."

"Whether this gets translated into higher official inflation numbers is anyone’s guess at this point. But for many items enjoyed by Americans who like cheap goods brought in from abroad – a majority of them from China – these things will soon be getting a lot less cheap."

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

Trump famously told Walmart execs to "'EAT THE TARIFFS,' and not charge valued customers ANYTHING."

"I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!" he warned.

Gasparino's anonymous sources told him that "the retailers’ warnings to the president about how they can’t just eat tariffs indefinitely were well received in the sense that Trump didn’t chase them out of the Oval."

Gasparino speculated that "When the price increases begin to spread, that could set up an interesting catfight between the president and a huge chunk of the business community."

Read The New York Post article here.

An attempt by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to blow off ethical and legal concerns about Donald Trump's crypto dinner on Thursday night might come back to haunt her boss.

Thursday afternoon Leavitt lectured reporters in the Brady Briefing Room about the dinner which was to include foreign investors at a Donald Trump golf resort in Virginia, telling NBC's Garrett Haake, "Well, as you know, Garrett, this question has been raised with the president. I have also addressed the dinner tonight. The president is attending it in his personal time. It is not a White House dinner, it’s not taking place here at the White House. But certainly I can raise that question and try to get you an answer for it."

Leavitt's claim of "personal time" caught the ear of multiple Trump critics.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

On X, The Bulwark's Tim Miller pointed out, "President's don't get 'personal time.' There's not like a magic suit you wear when you are doing official business and one where you are just Donald from Queens."

Conservative lawyer and ardent Trump opponent George Conway took the next step and suggested, "Actually, it’s fine. If Trump is saying he’s doing something on his 'personal time,' then obviously that means he’s not acting within what the Supreme Court calls 'the outer perimeter of his official responsibility,' which, in turn, means he’s not immune from criminal prosecution."

With Conway referencing the conservative Supreme Court's 2024 ruling that Trump and presidents who follow him are absolved of criminality if they are engaged in "official acts" as president, California attorney Tracey Gallagher also pounced on X.

"If Trump claims he’s acting on his 'personal time,' he’s likely implying he’s not operating in an official capacity as president," she asserted. "The Supreme Court, in cases like Trump v. United States (2024), distinguishes between official acts (within the president’s constitutional authority) and unofficial acts (personal conduct outside that scope). Official acts may carry immunity from criminal prosecution, while unofficial acts generally don’t. So, by framing something as 'personal time,' he’s suggesting it’s an unofficial act, potentially outside the immunity shield."

She later cited former Labor Secretary Robert Reich who observed, "The 220 top buyers of Trump's memecoin will have dinner with him at his golf club tonight. The average price of admission is $1M per person. Trump is literally selling access to government to the highest bidders."

Friday morning, conservative columnist Matt Lewis made the case on MSNBC that what the president did on Thursday night was nothing less than being the recipient of "bribery."

The Republican-led Senate passed the procedural vote to end a filibuster on a bill that would place regulations on the $250 billion stablecoin market with a bipartisan vote. However, one Fox correspondent

The "GENIUS Act" would create a framework for regulating stablecoins and address ongoing fears about consumer protections and other risks, the legislation explains. GENIUS stands for "Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins."

As Axios explained, 18 Democrats voted earlier this week to support the bill, but many of those same Democrats won't support it without "basic protections against corruption by public officials."

The Shib Daily reported Friday that Democrats intend to attach an Amendment to prevent "the U.S. president and other officials from financially benefiting from stablecoins."

ALSO READ: Democrats surrender huge stash of FTX crypto cash

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) has been a key player in negotiating the bill with his fellow Democrats. He argued they should back the bill even if they still have concerns about Trump's family crypto business.

“But we cannot allow that corruption to blind us to the broader reality: blockchain technology is here to stay,” Warner stated on Monday, Axios reported.

Pro-crypto Fox Business correspondent Charles Gasparino wrote for the New York Post that the bill's author, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), was nervous about whether it would make it past the 60-vote filibuster threshold.

“It will be either 59 votes or 70″ voting in favor, said Hagerty. Ultimately, he got 66 votes with Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Jerry Moran (R-KS) opposing it.

Gasparino celebrated Trump's transparency in his meme coin investments, but conceded, "you can make the case that it looks bad. It’s still an optics problem for the GOP that can be exploited when the senate tries to pass other more important crypto bills. Amendments about Trump’s business dealings could [bog] down full passage of the legislation. It’s the likely reason for some of the GOP holdouts."

"The problem is obvious," he explained. "The president appoints the people heading crypto regulation, the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Trump is literally deregulating an industry he’s profiting from. This appearance problem could be a sticking point when Congress takes its next legislative step, a rewrite of securities laws to better serve digital coins."

Read his column here.

Democrats are already plotting to go on the offense over House Republicans' vote to pass President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill."

According to Punchbowl News' Max Cohen, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already circulated a memo stating that the GOP's vote “will cost them their majority next year,” and that “No matter what happens in the Senate with respect to budget reconciliation, House Republicans have already sealed their political fate.”

This aligns with exclusive Raw Story reporting that Democrats are already strategizing on how to make Republicans pay for their vote.

The GOP's counterparts at the National Republican Congressional Committee, meanwhile, are doing their best to flip the script, attacking Democrats who opposed the legislation as voting for “tax hikes, handouts to illegal immigrants, and open border chaos.”

EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade

The Republican bill, which came together haphazardly after weeks of impasse and faction-fighting, cuts hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, food assistance, and green energy programs, along with a number of other items like ending the IRS' free tax filing service, prohibiting states from enforcing artificial intelligence regulations for a decade, and sharply limiting the ability of federal courts to civilly sanction Trump administration officials for contempt.

Ultimately, a number of House Republicans who held out over various issues, like Medicaid cuts being either too harsh or not harsh enough, or for a more generous state and local tax deduction, either accepted various compromises or relented.

It now goes to the Senate, where, although the GOP is eager to pass it, it is all but certain to face major revisions from Senate Republicans and intense opposition from Democrats who could use procedural hurdles to strip a number of its provisions out.