Donald Trump’s braggadocio just upended one of his executive orders.

U.S. Judge Beryl Howell issued a permanent injunction against the president Friday night, ruling that his executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie was not only unconstitutional but amounted to an “unprecedented attack” on the pillars of the judicial system.

“No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’” Howell wrote in a scathing 102-page opinion.

Trump signed an executive order against Perkins Coie in March, revoking the firm’s security clearances and their access to government buildings, and nixing government contracts with the firm, in part because they represented Hillary Clinton during her 2016 campaign.

But Howell dismantled the order, based on Trump’s own claims about forcing other law firms into submission. During an April 8 speech cited in Howell’s ruling, Trump peacocked that “lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump.”

“$100 million, another $100 million, for damages that they’ve done,” Trump said at the time. But they give you $100 million, and then they announce, ‘We have done nothing wrong.’ And I agree, they’ve done nothing wrong. But what the hell, they’ve given me a lot of money considering they’ve done nothing wrong.”

Also at fault was deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, whose comments about another law firm—Susman Godfrey—included flaunting that the administration had effectively finagled upward of a billion dollars in “free legal work” thanks to the executive branch’s pressure campaign.

Trump’s and Miller’s comments effectively proved that the president had singled firms out for “retribution” based on whether they were willing to cut a deal with the White House.

Perkins Coie said in a statement that the decision “affirms core constitutional freedoms all Americans hold dear, including free speech, due process, and the right to select counsel without the fear of retribution.”

It is unclear if the Trump administration plans to appeal the ruling.

U.S. spy agencies do not believe that the Venezuelan government has authority over the Tren de Aragua gang—a development that directly contradicts Trump’s justification for his illegal, extrajudicial deportations of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.

“While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” a memo from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence read, according to The New York Times.

Trump has been claiming the exact opposite since he invoked the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in March to summarily round up Venezuelan immigrants and deport them without basic due process.

Trump first invoked the wartime powers act in March, asserting that “this is a time of war. Because Biden allowed millions of people, many of them criminals, many of them at the highest level.… Other nations emptied their jails into the United States, it’s an invasion. These are criminals, many many criminals … murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords. People from mental institutions. That’s an invasion.” He also said Tren de Aragua gang members were committing crimes in the United States “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

The memo directly delegitimizes his argument, further confirming that Trump is operating well outside the bounds of his executive powers.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is still advocating for the creation of a disease registry that tracks people diagnosed with autism.

During an appearance Monday night on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle, Kennedy tried to explain why the government would need to collate citizens’ private medical records into a massive database—a plan that was announced last month by the National Institutes of Health, and then reportedly abandoned two days later after severe backlash.

“One in every 31 kids today. In California, which has the best database, it’s one in every 20 children, one in every 12.5 boys,” Kennedy claimed.

“This is an existential disease,” Kennedy continued. “Every other disease like this has a registry so that—and its voluntary—public health officials can monitor the numbers. It’s not private information, it’s not information that is gonna go out to other agencies, it’s a voluntary system where your privacy is protected. Just a system for keeping track of a disease that is now becoming debilitating to the American public.”

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published last month found that one in 31 children aged 8 years old has been identified with autism spectrum disorder. Days before that report had come out, Donald Trump was already spouting those exact numbers before claiming that autism could potentially be caused by vaccines.

While the CDC has documented an increase in diagnoses from 2000, when only one in 150 children born in 1992 was diagnosed with autism, experts have attributed some of the rise in diagnoses to a widening definition of autism spectrum disorder, which encapsulates a broader range of symptoms, as well as people being more aware of and willing to get diagnostic testing, according to ABC News.

Under Kennedy’s guidance, the CDC has launched a study on connections between vaccines and autism, despite extensive research debunking the conspiracy theory.

Pete Hegseth canceled military aid flights to Ukraine just a week into Trump’s second term without the president even knowing,

© New Republic