Welcome to the beat. I'm Ari Melbert, and we have a big show tonight, including one of our special

reports coming up. So we're going to get into all that, including some of the enterprise reporting

we've been doing, including drawing on lessons from history for this moment. But we begin tonight

with this big deal you may have heard about, and I'm going to show it to you. It is a federal judge

ruling that the Trump administration has done something that

we almost never see judges fine, that they are defying or failing to comply with a legal court order.

This is over something where Trump has already lost ground. There are many cases to follow. We'll keep

it clean and clear. But this was the one about their efforts to basically defy Congress's

power of the purse and freeze billions of dollars. The New York Times reports, it's the first time

they think a judge has declared the administration defying a court, and I will show you what the judge

says, quote, the order, that's the order they're defying, is, quote, clear and unambiguous. There

are no impediments to the defendants, that's defendant Trump,'re defying, is, quote, clear and unambiguous. There are no impediments to the

defendants, that's defendant Trump, White House compliance with the order, and persons who refuse to

obey an order generally risk criminal contempt. Now, this is one of several cases, but it is the big one,

both because this is what it looks like. It doesn't take many pages,

just about three and a half, when there's not much to debate. These are cases that Donald Trump

has been on a path to lose. If you follow these skirmishes, you know it can take time. So there's the

initial order, then there's motions, then there's later evidence, sometimes all the way up to

reviews by appeals

courts, but Donald Trump has been losing in many of the early rounds. And this is a judge saying

that after the loss, his aides at least, we don't know how hands-on Donald Trump was, are defying

the order to let the money out. Now, I will give you examples of what happens if you violate contempt, which is what

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