Donald Trump has stepped up his rhetoric on Greenland hours before Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance will meet its foreign minister along with Denmark’s at the White House.

Early Wednesday morning, the president posted on his Truth Social account, “The United States needs Greenland for the purposes of National Security.

“It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building,” he added, referring to the massive boondoggle he seeks to build. “NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!”

The governments of Denmark and Greenland requested Wednesday’s meeting in an attempt to clarify Trump’s renewed push to seize the territory. NATO’s leading parties, Greenland’s political parties, and Denmark all oppose the move, but that has not dissuaded Trump, who is dead set on taking Greenland despite a complete lack of evidence that Russia or China have their own plans to conquer it.

At a joint press conference on Tuesday, the premier of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said firmly that “if we have to choose between the USA and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark, and the EU.”

But Trump’s statement shows that his mind is made up, raising tensions ahead of Wednesday afternoon’s meeting. It will be interesting to see how Rubio and Vance treat the visiting Danish and Greenlandic officials, especially considering Vance’s past experiences with foreign leaders.

Top Justice Department officials Tuesday tore into a Trump-appointed federal judge who dared to ask why Lindsey Halligan is still calling herself a U.S. attorney.

In an 11-page filing, Halligan—fully backed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—slammed U.S. District Judge David Novak of Richmond for ordering Halligan to explain on what basis she has identified herself as U.S. attorney despite another ruling that she was improperly appointed.

Novak had pressed her on why that should not constitute a false or misleading statement, and why he should not strike her title from her cases—even suggesting that she might face disciplinary consequences for blatantly ignoring the law.

“The Court’s thinly veiled threat to use attorney discipline to cudgel the Executive Branch into conforming its legal position in all criminal prosecutions to the views of a single district judge is a gross abuse of power and an affront to the separation of powers,” the government wrote in the filing.

After Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled in November that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney—and her indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were dismissed—Justice Department officials continued to sign Halligan’s name on criminal indictments. When Novak questioned the legal basis for this, the DOJ suggested that Novak had somehow made a “fundamental error” in asserting that they were bound by Currie’s ruling.

The government claimed that Halligan could continue to identify as a U.S. attorney because Currie’s ruling “did not and could not require the United States to acquiesce to her contrary (and erroneous) legal reasoning outside of those cases,” pretending as if Currie had simply expressed a “disagreement” with the government’s view. The government claimed that it was within its rights to maintain its own “contested legal position.”

The government also claimed that Novak had a “fixation on a signature block title,” and claimed that “no authority exists for a court to strike an attorney title out of a signature block.”

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared poised Tuesday to allow states to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

The court heard oral arguments for two cases from Idaho and West Virginia in which lawyers for the trans teens argued that the state laws they’d challenged relied on broad generalization about the sexes, and their supposed biological advantages, that did not apply to their specific clients, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, solicitor generals from these states insisted that biological sex matters in sports because of supposed competitive advantages.

The first case was from Idaho, involving college senior Lindsay Hecox, who has attempted to drop her case in order to proceed through the rest of school “without the extraordinary pressures of this litigation and related public scrutiny.”

The second case involves Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia high school student. Pepper-Jackson’s lawyer, Joshua Block of the ACLU, argued that his client did not hold an unfair advantage to her teammates and opponents because she had never gone through male puberty and had been taking hormone blockers.

While the conservative justices acknowledged that there was some scientific disagreement about competitive advantages between the sexes, they still seemed inclined to agree with states. Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that Title IX did not protect transgender athletes from discrimination because it prevented discrimination based on “sex,” not gender identity.

“I hate, hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. Hate that. But we have kind of a zero-sum........

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