democracy forward Votevets
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400 lawsuits total
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20,226 views Aug 12, 2025 Defending Democracy with Marc Elias — Complete Podcast
Lawyers are at the forefront of the pro-democracy movement. That’s why there’s no one better to talk to about the fight for our country than CEO and president of Democracy Forward, Skye Perryman. She joins Marc to discuss recent victories, gerrymandering in her home state of Texas, and the battle for the rule of law.
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AN 12 25
A democracy advocacy organization is stepping up pressure on the federal government to release more information on President Donald Trump’s scheme to receive a $230 million payout from the US Department of Justice.
Democracy Forward on Monday filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) complaint against the DOJ and the US Department of Treasury, alleging that both agencies have so far refused to turn over any records related to what the group describes as Trump’s “stunning effort to obtain a $230 million taxpayer-funded payout for investigations into his own misconduct.”
The group notes that it has already filed multiple FOIA requests over the last several weeks, and in response neither DOJ or Treasury has “produced a single substantial record or issued a legally required determination.”
The complaint asks courts to compel DOJ and Treasury “to conduct searches for any and all responsive records” related to Democracy Forward’s past FOIA requests, and also to force the government “to produce, by a date certain, any and all non-exempt responsive records,” and to create an index “of any responsive records withheld under a claim of exemption.”
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said her organization’s lawsuit was a simple demand for government transparency.
“People in America deserve to know whether the Department of Justice is entertaining the president’s request to cut himself a taxpayer-funded $230 million check,” Perryman said. “If senior officials are processing this grift behind closed doors—including officials who used to represent him—that is not just bad optics, it is a direct threat to government integrity.”
Democracy Forward’s complaint stems from an October New York Times report that Trump was lobbying DOJ to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to him as compensation for the purported hardships he endured throughout the multiple criminal investigations and indictments leveled against him.
Trump was indicted in 2023 on federal charges related to his mishandling of top-secret government documents that he’d stashed in his Mar-a-Lago resort, as well as his efforts to illegally remain in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Both cases were dropped after Trump won the 2024 presidential election.
When asked about the DOJ payout scheme in the wake of the Times report, Trump insisted he would give any money paid out by the department to charity and asserted that he had been “damaged very greatly” by past criminal probes.
Perryman, however, insisted that Trump was not entitled to enrich himself off taxpayer funds.
“President Trump may think he can invoice people for the consequences of his own actions,” she said, “but this country still has laws, and we demand they be enforced.”
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Democracy Forward
Requesting Interior IG investigate Bernhardt's decision to stack Bears ...
Interior Secretary Bernhardt stacked the Bears Ears National Monument Advisory Committee with individuals determined to strip territory and critical protections from the Utah monument.
ThinkProgress
Scandals mount under David Bernhardt just two weeks after being ...
But Zinke's policy legacy is also living on under Bernhardt. One of the former secretary's most controversial actions as secretary remains the decision to dramatically shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, two Utah national monuments, the largest reduction in U.S. history.
Democracy Forward
Democracy Forward Requests Interior IG Investigate Bernhardt's Decision ...
Washington, D.C. — Today, Democracy Forward requested that the Inspector General of the Department of the Interior investigate whether Secretary David Bernhardt violated federal law by stacking the Bears Ears National Monument Advisory Committee with individuals determined to strip territory and critical
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moc oversight immigr detention 725
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AN 3 25
President Donald Trump and some of his close allies, including billionaire Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk, are calling for the impeachment of federal judges who are blocking his executive orders. And one of their main targets is U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, an appointee of former President Barack Obama who temporarily blocked the Trump Administration's deportations of Venezuelan nationals for alleged associations with the violent Tren de Aragua gang.
Critics of the deportations are arguing that the nationals were being deported to El Salvador without due process, and that some of them may have been wrongly accused of associating with Tren de Aragua.
One of those critics is attorney Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward.
READ MORE:Sabotaging Social Security: Behind the leaked memo to cut agency staff and critical services
, Perryman laid out some civil liberties concerns that the deportations are raising. Perryman came on after former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance, who told MSNBC's Ana Cabrera that Trump and his allies are exercising "minimal compliance with" Boasberg's order.
Perryman brought up the due process concerns,, "The government continues to believe that it's above the law and to operate in secrecy in this case. So we are continuing…. to obtain information. But what we haven't seen, of course, is anything — and this is, I think, what every American in this country should be concerned about — the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is an attempt to summarily remove people from this country without any process at all. And so, we have been submitting information from concerned family members who believe that people may have been removed from this country who are not actually members of. gangs or had no basis for being removed, but have been removed from the country without any process at all."
The, "That is the real problem here. And then, the doubly concerning problem, and something that should concern every American, is the way in which the government has been operating in this case, suggesting at times that there is a question as to whether it has to follow a district court order from a federal judge. And so, we believe this is a highly concerning situation."
Perryman argued that the Trump Administration is not operating "in good faith."
READ MORE:'Clear and present danger': Experts alarmed at 'insanity' of Musk getting secret war plans
, "We will be holding the government accountable to the law as is required in this case…. There is a lot of highly politicized rhetoric coming out of the White House. But this is a president that has invoked an act that has only been invoked three times in the nation's history."
READ MORE:'Red flag': Alarm as judges face threats of violence after ruling against Trump
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an 3 25
A watchdog organization on Monday launched a public records probe to determine the extent to which the Trump administration and its billionaire wrecking ball, Elon Musk, are using artificial intelligence as part of their lawless effort to purge the federal workforce.
"The American people deserve to know what is going on—including if and how artificial intelligence is being used to reshape the departments and agencies people rely on daily," said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, the group behind the new investigation.
"We will continue to use every tool at our disposal to force the Trump-Vance administration to fulfill its obligation to the public and to our system of laws," Perryman added.
The probe comes days after NBC Newsreported that federal workers' responses to Musk's email ultimatum were "expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary."
"The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language," the news outlet reported, citing unnamed sources. "The AI system will determine whether someone's work is mission-critical or not."
Additionally, according toThe Washington Post, Musk lieutenants "have fed sensitive data from across the Education Department into artificial intelligence software."
"For an administration that claimed it wanted to bring about transparency and efficiency in government, the Trump-Vance administration's purge of public servants and sloppy processes have done just the opposite."
Democracy Forward said Monday that it would use Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in an attempt to shine light on the administration's reliance on AI for personnel decisions. The Trump Justice Department argued in a court filing last week that the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is exempt from public records requests—a claim that experts have rejected and condemned as an attempt to skirt oversight.
"For an administration that claimed it wanted to bring about transparency and efficiency in government, the Trump-Vance administration's purge of public servants and sloppy processes have done just the opposite," Perryman said Monday. "DOGE and this administration are operating in a shroud of secrecy, and their 'govern by chaos' tactics have only made government less efficient and caused disruptions to our safety and security."
Democracy Forward said its new FOIA requests were sent to DOGE as well as the Office of Personnel Management, the State Department, the Education Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the General Services Administration, among other agencies.
*Wired reported last month that "Thomas Shedd, the recently appointed Technology Transformation Services director and Elon Musk ally, told General Services Administration workers that the agency's new administrator is pursuing an 'AI-first strategy.'"
"Shedd provided a handful of examples of projects GSA Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian is looking to prioritize, including the development of 'AI coding agents' that would be made available for all agencies," Wired added. "Shedd made it clear that he believes much of the work at [Technology Transformation Services] and the broader government, particularly around finance tasks, could be automated.
Geoffrey Fowler, the Post's technology columnist, noted Monday that "lots of recent evidence shows that relying on automation alone to make critical decisions can lead to big government mistakes."
"Just ask New York City, where last year a government AI chatbot advised businesses to break the law," Fowler wrote. "Or Australia, where a deeply flawed algorithm called Robodebt created the opposite of efficiency: the government had to settle for more than a billion dollars with citizens for wrongly reclaiming benefits."
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an 1 24
in a Sunday article from NBC News, Peter Nicholas, Katherine Doyle, Megan Lebowitz and Courtney Kube report, "a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers is quietly devising plans to try to foil any efforts to expand presidential power, which could include pressuring the military to cater" to Donald Trump's politics.
Per NBC, "Trump has raised fresh questions about his intentions if he regains power by putting forward a legal theory that a president would be free to do nearly anything with impunity — including assassinate political rivals — so long as Congress can’t muster the votes to impeach him" and remove him from office.
"We're already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to," Mary McCord, former US attorney and executive director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told the news outlet.
Other experts "taking part in the effort told NBC News they are studying Trump’s past actions and 2024 policy positions so that they will be ready if he wins in November," which "involves preparing to take legal action and send letters to Trump appointees spelling out consequences they’d face if they undermine constitutional norms."
NBC notes:
*Among the least-understood tools available to a president is the Insurrection Act. Vaguely worded, it gives a president considerable discretion in deciding what constitutes an uprising and when it is OK to deploy active-duty military in response, experts say.
*Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill worry that Trump might invoke the act to involve the armed forces in the face of domestic protests or if the midterm elections don’t go his way.
"There are an array of horrors that could result from Donald Trump's unrestricted use of the Insurrection Act," US Senator Richard Blumenthal (R-CT) said in an interview, according to NBC. "A malignantly motivated president could use it in a vast variety of dictatorial ways unless at some point the military itself resisted what they deemed to be an unlawful order. But that places a very heavy burden on the military."
Blumenthal, NBC reports, is currently working on legislation "that would clarify the act and give Congress and the courts some say in its use."
READ MORE: 'The end of democracy': Bernie Sanders says 'humiliated' Trump could cause 'collapse'
Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman told NBC, "We are preparing for litigation and preparing to use every tool in the toolbox that our democracy provides to provide the American people an ability to fight back. We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy and it’s incumbent on everybody to do their part."
*NBC News' full report is here.
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an 3 23
veterans group is appealing to the U.S. Pentagon to implement a ban that would prohibit Fox News from being accessible on military bases.
According to HuffPost, the progressive political action committee (PAC) VoteVets on Monday posted a video to highlight concerns about the right-wing news network and its anchors who have knowingly circulated baseless, unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud following the 2020 presidential election.
“The most valuable weapon to the enemy is disinformation,” the narrator began. “That’s why the Pentagon spends hundreds of millions training our troops to resist it."
READ MORE: Fox News’ Pete Hegseth has been lobbying Trump to pardon accused war criminals: report
"Yet, at the same time, the U.S. military uses taxpayer-funded facilities to broadcast disinformation on military bases, knowingly letting false propaganda infiltrate the ranks," the narrator added.
At one point during the clip, the narrator also noted that Fox News' Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have “open access to spread their conspiracy theories to U.S. troops."
The push for a Fox News ban on military bases comes as Fox News' Tucker Carlson faces criticism for his latest attempt to spread misleading information about the Jan. 6 insurrection.
During his broadcast on Monday night, Carlson featured subtle clips of Capitol surveillance footage in an effort to support his argument suggesting what transpired on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection.
liberal veterans group is suing to block the influence of three outside advisers who have been secretly influencing the Department of Veterans Affairs from Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida.
ProPublica reported last week that the advisers — Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter, West Palm Beach doctor Bruce Moskowitz and Washington lawyer Marc Sherman — have been shaping VA personnel and policy decisions despite having no official role or relevant expertise.
The trio, sometimes referred to as the “Mar-a-Lago Crowd,” is failing to disclose its activities as required by federal law, according to a lawsuit filed today in federal court in Washington, D.C., by VoteVets, a liberal activist group that says it represents 500,000 supporters.
The Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, is a Watergate-era sunshine law that requires federal agencies to inform the public when they consult outside experts. VoteVets wants a judge to order the Mar-a-Lago Crowd to disclose records of its activities and cease influencing the VA until it complies with the law. The suit also asks that future meetings of the group be opened to public participation and that minutes of its meetings be kept.
“This group has been operating in the dark,” said Will Fischer, VoteVets’ director of government relations. “Our goal in bringing this lawsuit is to bring these activities to light and make sure our members, veterans and military families are able to see what’s going on with our VA and the people directing the activities of our VA.”
The VA referred questions about the lawsuit to the Justice Department, which didn’t answer a request for comment. In a statement, a spokeswoman for Perlmutter, Sherman and Moskowitz responded: “We have watched with concern as media outlets — including ProPublica — have misrepresented our actions and used selective emails to paint a distorted picture of our efforts to help the VA and America’s veterans.” The statement asserted that none of the group’s “volunteer efforts,” which it characterized as “recommendations” made in response to requests from the VA, were conducted in secret and that the group didn’t attempt to develop policy or influence personnel decisions.
VoteVets is represented by Democracy Forward, an activist group that challenges actions by the Trump administration. The group has brought similar lawsuits against a hunting council at the Interior Department and an infrastructure panelat the departments of Transportation and Commerce. In the latter case, a judge granted initial discovery.
“It looks like what was happening here was a group of people giving collective advice to the VA, which is precisely the kind of case where FACA should apply,” said John Bies, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Obama administration. Courts, he added, have deemed similar government committees to be subject to FACA in the past.
FACA claims have been extensively litigated for decades, with occasional successes for plaintiffs. For example, in 1994, a court ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service not to use a scientific report that was prepared without conforming to FACA, and in 2006, a court found that a panel doing an assessment for the Forest Service did amount to an advisory committee under FACA and had to disclose documents. But the two best-known cases brought under the law were ultimately unsuccessful: challenges to first lady Hillary Clinton’s health care task force in 1993 and Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force in 2002.