On Background Checks for Trump Appointees, The Magic Number Is “Four”

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Yesterday, Hugo Lowell reported that Trump wants to bypass FBI background checks until he has gutted the FBI.

Trump officials to receive immediate clearances and easier FBI vetting
Exclusive: president-elect’s team planning for background checks to occur only after administration takes over bureau

Donald Trump’s transition team is planning for all political appointees to receive sweeping security clearances on the first day and only face FBI background checks after the incoming administration takes over the bureau and its own officials are installed in key positions, according to people familiar with the matter.

The move appears to mean that Trump’s team will continue to skirt FBI vetting and may not receive classified briefings until Trump is sworn in on 20 January and unilaterally grant sweeping security clearances across the administration.

Trump’s team has regarded the FBI background check process with contempt for months, a product of their deep distrust of the bureau ever since officials turned over transition records to the Russia investigation during the first Trump presidency, the people said.

But delaying FBI vetting could also bring ancillary PR benefits for the Trump team if some political appointees run into problems during a background check, which could upend their Senate confirmation process, or if they struggle to obtain security clearances once in the White House.

In the days before this story, as I laid out here, up to five Senators have spoken with various degrees of fortitude in support of requiring FBI background checks before confirming any Trump appointee. Lisa Murkowski did so in an Alaskan interview. Then the Hill quoted four Senators at least expressing support for background checks, with Susan Collins, Kevin Cramer, and Mike Rounds joining Murkowski in questioning the value of a private firm’s review as opposed to the FBI’s.

“The FBI should do the background checks, in my judgement,” said Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), who serves as the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense and as a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued that the FBI has access to information gathered by law enforcement on the federal, state and local levels that private firms don’t.

“If you wanted to supplement it with a private firm, I’d say OK. But the FBI does have access to information that probably a private firm wouldn’t have, even a really good savvy one,” he said.

Cramer said a private firm could help the FBI in its background investigations, but he “sure wouldn’t leave it” entirely outside the FBI’s hands.

[snip — click through to see Murkowski’s comments]

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said not having the FBI conduct background checks for high-level nominees by the time Trump formally appoints them next year “would come under scrutiny at the congressional level.”

He said lawmakers “would want to know the validity of those individuals doing the background checks.”

“Just because the White House doesn’t request a background check out of the FBI wouldn’t then mean perhaps some committees might not ask for it,” he said.

A different Hill story, which focuses on Scott Caucus member Bill Hagerty scoffing at the value of background checks, also quotes Joni Ernst saying FBI checks would be “helpful,” at least for Pete Hegseth.

Other Senate Republicans, however, say the FBI should retain its leading role in conducting background checks, and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a member of the Armed Services Committee, says an FBI background check of Hegseth would be “helpful.”

I get that Susan Collins has a history of backing down from principles she claims to care about. I get that some of these statements are squishy. It is also true that right wingers are already targeting Murkowski’s more categorical statement as some kind of Deep State plot.

But even as the pressure on Murkowski ratchets up, those seeking to prevent the wholesale takeover of the government by conspiracy theorists need to understand that it will take more than journalism about the risks of entrusting the intelligence community to a woman who finds Bashar al-Assad persuasive and the largest military in the world to a guy slathered with white supremacist tattoos (though experts have pointed out that for some of these positions, a proper vetting would require further intelligence involving).

It requires convincing four Republicans in the Senate to insist on doing the bare minimum by requiring background checks. In a 53-47 Senate, any four Republican block of voters, joining the Democrats, would be enough to thwart Trump’s crazier plans.

Want proof that can work? After four Republicans (and then six) came out against Matt Gaetz’ nomination, Trump conceded he didn’t have and never would get the votes.

Realizing this — understanding that the Magic Number to guard against Trump’s crazier plans is four — makes things both easier, and harder. Easier, because we know that only a quarter of Senate Republicans (including Hagerty) will reflexively support everything Trump does, at least as measured by support for Rick Scott over one of the more institutionalist Senate Majority Leader candidates. And harder, because most of these people have a history of caving and Trump will bring a great deal of pressure on them to do so again.

But that’s no reason to cede the fight ahead of time. On the contrary, it’s all the more reason to spend the time, now, to call Republican Senators who might demand background checks — to call your Republican Senator — and insist that exercise at least that minimum level of due diligence for the most powerful positions in government.

Get used to that magic number, four. Because trying to persuade four-Senator blocks of Republicans to oppose something is one of the most obvious ways to protect the country.

The Zombie Case against Trump’s Indicted Co-Conspirators

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Jack Smith signed the motion to dismiss the January 6 case against Trump, but his appellate lawyer, James Pearce, (digitally) signed the parallel request before the 11th Circuit.

Who knows whether that means anything.

But now that Smith has committed to sustaining the appeal of Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision as it applies to Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, someone needs to take over the case and write the reply, which is due on December 2. Pearce has done the primary work for all Jack Smith’s appeals and so could do so here — or, perhaps Jack Smith will close up shop, along with Pearce, and let Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar take over before she’s replaced by John Sauer in January.

One way or another, there’s likely to be a transfer of the Zombie case back to DOJ, where it will be suffocated with pillows never to be heard from again.

The decision to sustain the Nauta and De Oliveira case just long enough for Trump to shut down next year has certain ramifications I only touched in passing in this discussion with Harry Litman about what we might get in a report from Jack Smith, which is probably more accessible than this post about what declination decisions we might see (transcript here).

First, they’ve got due process rights. Meaning, you can’t say anything in a report that might endanger their ability to get a fair trial (a trial they’ll never face, of course). That may lead to redactions of the sort we saw in the original Mueller Report but which were re-released under FOIA. Or it may lead prosecutors to gloss certain things — such as the obstruction — in the report. In the chat with Litman, I noted that ABC reported that Walt Nauta and Trump went back to Mar-a-Lago after hiding documents from the FBI, which might make the report. But if it appears in there, it would need to be presented in such a way to protect Nauta’s due process rights.

It’s possible, even, that until the appeal, DOJ would avoid describing the investigative steps taken in the documents case after Smith was appointed in November 2022. The logic of Cannon’s opinion basically wiped out all that investigative work. Poof. Though it’s possible that Julie Edelstein and David Raskin — who left Smith’s team in October — have done something to recreate some of the work, such as the declassification that had happened in advance of an imagined Florida trial.

Meanwhile, sustaining the case against Nauta and De Oliveira creates an interesting dilemma for DOJ that may have repercussions for others and Trump’s DOJ going forward: how to get rid of the appeal. He would pay least political capital by just dismissing the appeal. But that would reflect a DOJ stance that Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed — something that might bind DOJ going forward (as if Pam Bondi won’t just pick Trumpy US Attorneys to do her dirty work like Bill Barr did) — though that may be unavoidable if Trump’s Solicitor General and Deputy Attorney General had both argued that Smith was unconstitutionally appointed, as they have.

But that would go some way to arguing that David Weiss’ appointment as Special Counsel is unconstitutional as well. It might give Hunter Biden, if his father doesn’t pardon him (and Alexander Smirnov, if he is convicted next month and not pardoned) cause to enjoin Weiss’ prosecutors from publishing a report; it would also make Hunter’s appeal of his charges far easier, especially in Los Angeles, where Weiss is not the confirmed US Attorney.

Which may be why (as both Litman and I suggested) Trump might want to pardon Hunter — to give the air of magnanimity to unintended consequences of his efforts to kill the case against him. To say nothing of the transparency into Trump’s first term that Hunter might get if he succeeds with his other appeals.

The case against Nauta and De Oliveira will be dead, one way or another, in two months. But until then, it’ll exist as a Zombie, having potentially unanticipated consequences.

Update: The full Jack Smith team has submitted its reply brief.

Boris’ Shakedown

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By all accounts, CNN was the first to report that lawyers for Trump conducted a review of Boris Epshteyn’s “consulting” for access to Trump. Not long after, John Solomon wrote a more thorough version of the story, including the detail that an announcement for Boris’ appointment as an Assistant to Trump in the White House has been held up as the review concluded.

A week ago, a draft of a press release was handed to transition aides announcing Epshteyn as an assistant to the president, but it was never released, several senior aides confirmed to Just the News. He has told some friends in recent days that he might prefer to stay on the outside rather than go into the administration.

Before I get into what those reports say, consider Hugo Lowell’s take, which focuses not so much on the allegations, but on an assertion that the report itself arises from in-fighting among Trump’s team.

Epshteyn remained part of Trump’s inner circle as of Monday evening, with Trump riding high on the news that special counsel prosecutors had moved to dismiss the two federal criminal cases against him – a victory he credited to Ephsteyn.

The first person that Trump called when prosecutors withdrew the cases against him was Epshteyn, according to two people with Trump at the time, which occurred just as CNN first reported the existence of the review into Epshteyn’s consultancy scheme.

For the remainder of the day, Epshteyn was on the offensive as his allies dismissed the review as an attempt by Warrington to decapitate Epshteyn after he successfully pushed for Bill McGinley to be the White House counsel, rather than Warrington, who had also been in contention for the role.

Epshteyn’s allies later portrayed the review as a political hit job capitalizing on Epshteyn’s role in pushing for the former congressman Matt Gaetz to get the nomination for attorney general before it sank under the weight of sexual misconduct allegations.

It’s unclear the event that predicated the investigation (note that Steven Cheung told multiple outlets that the review focused on others in addition to Boris). But incoming Treasury nominee Scott Bessent’s discomfort with Boris’ entreaties, going back to February and including a pitch for a basketball related business with some ties to Steve Bannon, seem to have played a key role.

Which is one question I have about this process. The various stories quote disgruntled targets, including a defense contractor whose access Boris promised to throttle going forward. CBS includes comment from Don Bolduc, who found the entire process of getting Trump’s neutrality in a New Hampshire Senate primary so distasteful, he left politics thereafter (though a Bolduc staffer was more positive about the experience).

“There’s nothing honorable about politics,” said Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general. After his failed Senate race, Bolduc enrolled in a police academy and became a rookie small-town cop at age 60.

But it doesn’t say whether Matt Gaetz paid Boris for his support for a reckless bid to be Attorney General just as the ethics report into him was completed.

Boris’ “consulting” has been public for years, in campaign finance disclosures. What seems to have happened here is that someone who, after some brawling, came out of ahead on a contentious cabinet spot, Treasury, complained about the manner in which Boris monetizes his access to Trump.

But the timing of the effort matters: given the dismissal of the federal cases against Trump, he’s unlikely to prioritize the views of those who didn’t help him beat the rap, at least for now. Heck, that may explain the conflicting stories about whether the inquiry is done or not: maybe Trump ended it once the dismissals came out.

And so six people who would like to see him gone have made sure this gets publicized.

It’s sort of cute: People like Solomon claim that Trump’s promise to Drain the Swamp was anything but projection. So whatever else this incident does (Eric Trump has suggested it could lead to Boris’ ouster, but perhaps that’s just from the White House itself), it may disabuse Trumpsters of their fantasy that they’re not part of a very corrupt system.

One more point: I assume there will be a Jack Smith report. And I assume it’ll include Boris’ actions in there, actions that (like this shakedown) seem to tie to Steve Bannon. If people are interested enough in ousting Boris that may provide an interesting dynamic.

Just a Quarter of Republican Senators Voted for Rick Scott

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Politico is one of the outlets that is focusing most productively on areas of tension between Article I Republicans and Trump. Their very good House journalists have this piece on objections to impoundment (which would strip the House of its most basic function, the power to appropriate), use of military for mass deportation (from Rand Paul), and tariffs (from John Thune). Josh Gerstein noted Chuck Grassley’s opposition to Trump’s plan to replace all the current Inspectors General. And they did an uneven post on which Senators might be most likely to oppose Trump (which was perhaps too early to note that Utah’s Senator-elect John Curtis was among the first to go on the record with concerns about Matt Gaetz). Mike Rounds gave a hawkish interview in support of Ukraine. And after Lisa Murkowski said (in a little-noticed Alaska interview) that she won’t vote to confirm any Trump nominee who has not undergone an FBI background check, four more Senators — Susan Collins, Kevin Cramer, Rounds, as well as Joni Ernst — joined Murkowski in expressing support for background checks (though without making them a litmus test), with Bill Hagerty scoffing at the entire idea that they’re necessary.

There are far too many Democrats dismissing the possibility that there can be meaningful opposition to Trump from Congress. The Senate, especially, held up some of Trump’s plans the first go-around, even before he sicced an armed mob on them. And if nothing else, these people love their own prerogatives, and so will — at least selectively — defend those (as the bid to insist on FBI background checks would be a means to do).

More importantly, we don’t have the luxury of assuming Republicans will routinely capitulate to Trump: It is the job of the Democratic party, at this point, to give them cause to do so. Yes, Mitch McConnell failed in 2021 when he had an opportunity to disqualify Trump. He will have further opportunities to amend his own failure, and it’s simply not an option not to fight to get him to do so. Not least, because the mere act of doing so effectively may have an effect in 2026, if elections are really held.

And that’s why I’ve been trying to identify what I’m calling the Scott Caucus: The (just) 13 Republicans who voted for Rick Scott in the first round of the election for Majority leader. There was a good deal of pressure, including from online influencers who can elicit mob and also Elon Musk, the mobster incarnate, to vote for Trump’s pick for Majority Leader, Scott. But he lost in the first round of voting, with a reported outcome of:

  • Thune 23
  • Cornyn 15
  • Scott 13
  • Not voting 2

Thune won the second round between him and Cornyn 29-24.

To repeat: Just 13 members of the Senate voted, on a secret ballot, for Trump’s preferred candidate for Majority Leader. There’s undoubtedly a lot that went into that vote, but the 38 Senators who affirmatively voted against Scott are people who voted, at least partly, against capitulating to Trump.

We don’t know who all is included in that list, but these people publicly endorsed Scott:

  1. Marsha Blackburn
  2. Ted Cruz
  3. Hagerty
  4. Ron Johnson
  5. Mike Lee
  6. Rand Paul
  7. Marco Rubio
  8. Tommy Tuberville

I suggested that this vote, of the people who voted against Charles Q. Brown to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, might be a proxy for other Senators who prefer gross politicization against basic competence — though according to his public statements, Josh Hawley voted for Thune.

Whoever the other five people are (Rubio, of course, will be replaced once he is confirmed as Secretary of State), they’re just a small fraction of the GOP Senate.

Republicans will enjoy their time in the majority, and most of the time most Republican Senators will gleefully support what Trump will do.

But when given a choice to capitulate immediately or to uphold their own prerogatives, an overwhelming majority of Republican Senators voted to defend their own privilege.

Pam Bondi Offers a Platform to Expose the Consequences of Trump’s Past Corruption

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Greg Sargent had a column proposing ways for Democrats to really challenge Pam Bondi at her confirmation hearing. He describes it as an opportunity to expose how badly she’ll be willing to politicize rule of law.

Democrats should start thinking right now about the opportunity presented by Bondi’s Senate confirmation hearings next year. This will be a major occasion to unmask just how far she’ll gladly go in corrupting the rule of law and unleashing the state on all the “vermin” he has threatened to persecute.

“The attorney general will be the weaponizer-in-chief of the legal system for Trump,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, told me.

While I agree with Sargent’s premise — Democrats should treat Bondi’s confirmation hearing as an opportunity — I disagree with his proposed approach (and that espoused by Jamie Raskin, whom he quotes at length).

Sargent’s focus is on how Bondi would act under predictable eventualities.

Trump has threatened to prosecute enemies without cause. How will Bondi respond when he demands such prosecutions? He has vowed to yank broadcasting rights to punish media companies that displease him and send the military into blue areas for indeterminate pacification missions. His advisers are reportedly exploring whether military officers involved in the Afghanistan mission can be court-martialed. Raskin says Bondi should be confronted on all of this: “Ask whether she thinks the First Amendment and due process are any impediment to what Trump has called for.”

But this is precisely the approach that failed with Bill Barr, who months after a contentious confirmation hearing, kicked off the process of politicizing DOJ.

Most tellingly, Barr was asked questions about the kind of foreseeable eventualities that Sargent describes (such as, pardons for January 6ers), and it did no good. Patrick Leahy, Amy Klobuchar, and Lindsey Graham all asked Barr whether pardoning someone for false testimony would amount to obstruction. Every time, Barr at least conceded the potential applicability of obstruction in that case. And then, just months after that hearing, when Barr wrote a declination memo for Robert Mueller’s obstruction charge, he simply ignored the pardons. He didn’t mention them at all. While it took years for us to learn how he had reneged on his own stated views (by simply ignoring them), those setting these expectations never found a way to hold him accountable for the dodge.

That said, January 6 Committee staffer Thomas Joscelyn, whom Sargent also quotes, gets a bit closer to the approach I’d recommend. Don’t ask Bondi whether she would do something; make sure you lay out her responsibility for inevitable consequences when things she’s likely to do have untoward effects.

“What happens if Trump pardons the Proud Boys leaders who were convicted for seditious conspiracy and instigating the violence?” said Tom Joscelyn, a lead author of the Jan. 6 Committee report, in suggesting lines of questioning for Bondi. “What about the dozens of defendants convicted of assaulting cops?”

Joscelyn adds that pardons for them would provide a major boost to violent far right extremist groups in this country and would “legitimize their cause.” Dems should confront Bondi with all of that. Make her own every last bit of it.

Where I’d add to what Joscelyn suggests is with Trump’s past history.

Rather than asking Bondi about something we know will happen going forward (political violence from freed militia members), ask her how she’ll avoid the negative consequences Trump’s past actions already had. Rather than asking Bondi whether she’ll be responsible for Proud Boy violence when Trump pardons them, instead note that Bill Barr treated threats  the Proud Boys and Roger Stone made against Amy Berman Jackson as a technicality, only to have them plan an insurrection 18 months later. “Bill Barr’s coddling of Trump’s far right extremists led to a predictable increased threat, an attack on the Capitol. How will you avoid the same mistake?” It uses the confirmation hearing to lay out the consequences of past corruption.

You can use this approach with pardons more generally. “Because Trump didn’t properly vet his pardons the first time around, at least seven of them quickly returned to crime, with many of them beating their spouses. How will you ensure that Trump’s bypassing of normal pardon protocol don’t put violent men back on the streets?” You can pick some of the January 6ers — like hardened criminal Shane Jenkins, who almost had a fundraiser at Bedminster, or NeoNazi Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who did — to ask Bondi how coddling such criminals is consistent with the law-and-order promises she makes.

The difference, so far, is subtle: Using the hearing to show past consequences for Barr or Trump’s own failures, rather than generically predicting future woes.

But that difference becomes more important when adopting a more important focus for the hearing.

Like the legitimization of far right extremists that Joscelyn predicts, we can predict a number of other inevitable outcomes from Trump’s second term. The most important is that as billionaires like Elon Musk loot the government, government service will decline precipitously, only exacerbating the alienation of many of the people who voted for Trump. And when those same billionaires get impunity from Trump’s DOJ, consumers will have their lives ruined. But Trump will work hard to blame scapegoats: liberals, trans people, and unions, rather than the billionaires Trump chose to given direct control over the looting process.

Democrats need to build in accountability for the corruption from the beginning. They need to explain that a crash in life quality is the inevitable consequence of Trump’s corruption and — just as important because committed MAGAts are more likely to turn on others before they turn on Trump — his billionaire appointees and protected buddies.

And Pam Bondi offers a spectacular way to lay that out, because she has been involved in protecting the villains who harmed Trump supporters in the past.

“Ms. Bondi, these ardent Trump supporters who signed up for Trump University racked up debt but got nothing from their degrees. How will you avoid such abuse of consumers going forward?”

“Ms. Bondi, after you fired the attorneys who were investigating banks foreclosing based on dodgy paperwork, millions of Floridians lost their homes. How will you protect Americans from similar business fraud going forward?”

“Ms. Bondi, after you and Rudy Giuliani made false claims about the vote in Pennsylvania, many of them threw their lives away by attacking the Capitol. How will you ensure that such lies don’t harm Trump supporters going forward?”

There are similar questions she can be asked that will anticipate other actions she’s likely to take — like shutting down investigations into Elon Musk’s various stock manipulations and false claims. “Ms. Bondi, how will you protect consumers who purchased cars falsely sold as self-driving?”

There are other questions that might get at Bondi’s past complicity. “Ms. Bondi, why did you and Trump’s other impeachment defense attorneys claim Trump’s demand for an investigation into Burisma was a pursuit of corruption, when Trump’s own DOJ had just shut down a 3-year investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky’s corruption?”

But the most important questions can and should be framed in terms of the Trump supporters whom her past corruption has harmed.

Democrats are not going to prevent Bondi’s confirmation. They’re also not going to get reassurances that Bondi will protect the integrity of the Department; Bill Barr’s prevarications prove that’s futile.

But they can use the high profile confirmation process as a way to lay out what should be a relentless message going forward: corruption hurts the little guy. Trump’s past corruption has hurt his supporters. Bondi’s past corruption has hurt his supporters.

That’s what the Republicans who will confirm her should have to own: the inevitable consequences of her protection of Trump’s corruption and that of the other billionaires who will be swarming his administration.

WaPo Enthusiastically Joins Trump’s Attack on Rule of Law

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One reason why Trump managed to win the election in spite of his four felony prosecutions is because self-imagined journalists never fact-checked him when he falsely claimed his prosecutions — all of them — were partisan witch hunts.

This article, from WaPo, is a remarkable example.

It confirms what was already clear — that Trump will attempt to fire everyone who worked on his own criminal prosecutions — and adds that Trump also intends to use DOJ to investigate his claims of voter fraud that his own DOJ already debunked in late 2020. It describes this fascist project to politicize DOJ as evidence of his “intention to dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington.”

The post notes that Trump, “lost to Joe Biden but continues to insist [the election] was stolen from him in key battlegrounds,” and describes that, “neither the president-elect nor his allies have ever provided evidence to prove their claims of voter fraud.”

But it doesn’t mention that Bill Barr’s DOJ already did investigate Trump’s claims of election fraud. And although Josh Dawsey is bylined, the story mentions none of Dawsey’s several stories on contractors whom Trump hired in 2020, who looked for — but could not find — any evidence to back these claims (one two three).

More tellingly, WaPo’s four journalists don’t bother to correct Karoline Leavitt’s objectively false claim that, “President Trump won the election in a landslide,” a claim that could be easily debunked by pointing out that Trump won’t break 50% of the popular vote and won by less than 2%.

They just let Leavitt lie.

Worse still, they repeated Trump’s claims of grievance over and over, saying only that it is a frequent claim, not a false one.

[1] a Trump spokeswoman echoed the president-elect’s frequent claim that the Justice Department cases against him were politically motivated.

“President Trump campaigned on firing rogue bureaucrats who have [2] engaged in the illegal weaponization of our American justice system, and the American people can expect he will deliver on that promise,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “One of the many reasons that President Trump won the election in a landslide is Americans are sick and tired of seeing their tax dollars spent on [3] targeting the Biden-Harris Administration’s political enemies rather than going after [a] real violent criminals in our streets.”

[snip]

And he has [4] maintained from the start that Smith’s investigations into his efforts to reverse his defeat — as well as his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left the White House — are examples of the weaponization of government against him that must be avenged.

[snip]

“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice [5] has been weaponized against me and other Republicans,” Trump wrote when announcing his new pick, longtime ally Pam Bondi, in a post on Truth Social. “Not anymore. Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, [b] and Making America Safe Again.”

There are plenty of ways people who chose to engage in journalism could debunk these false claims: to point out that Joe Biden was also investigated for retaining classified documents, to describe that a former Trump US Attorney, Robert Hur, found characteristics that distinguished Trump’s case from Biden’s, to explain what those distinctions were — Trump’s year-long effort to hide documents from DOJ. Regarding January 6, a journalist might explain that hundreds of other people were charged with the same main crime — obstructing the vote certification — as Trump was, but in his case the fraudulent certificates made the evidence even stronger.

At the very least, describe — in detail! — what Trump was charged with! WaPo chooses not to do that.

On the claims of politicization, the laziest reporter might note at least that Joe Biden’s own son was prosecuted on two coasts, along with three high profile Democrats — Bob Menendez, Henry Cuellar, and Eric Adams.

Trump’s claim that Biden’s DOJ targeted Republicans is laughable, and yet four self-imagined journalists repeated the claim as if it were true.

Trump’s claims that Biden’s DOJ didn’t prosecute violent criminals in the streets bears special focus, since hundreds of the January 6ers — people Trump has suggested he’ll pardon — are just that: people convicted of violently assaulting cops.

And his claim that Pam Bondi will fight crime as if Merrick Garland did not? For fuck sake, people, mention that crime rates came down under Biden.

WaPo packages up all this unrebutted propaganda as a process story. Twelve paragraphs in, it addresses the question of whether Trump will be able to fire career employees. In ¶15, it describes the make-up of Jack Smith’s team.

But it’s all buried under dumb repetition of Trump’s attack on rule of law, as if the attack were true. WaPo just couldn’t be bothered to conduct the least little act of journalism on that point, and so simply repeated Trump’s false claims of grievance with no correction.

And as such, the article itself becomes part of precisely the outrageous abuse it describes: the creation of a false myth of grievance by burying (literally in Trump’s case and figuratively in the case of four people calling themselves journalists) the reality about rule of law.

“A Farce, or a Tragedy, or Perhaps Both.”

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Why Trump Won

The making of the electorate Trump just won, and thusly the United States we have now, started decades ago in school. The Conservative Takeover of America was not secret, it was worse than secret; it was boring and bureaucratic. The conservatives worked slowly, patiently, and persistently to not merely change our institutions, but to hobble the next generation, and the next after that. This effort maybe started in Texas, but it had metastasized all over the country years before the first early ballot was cast in 2024. It was massive, and coordinated, but not by any overt conspiracy. Instead it was a persistent and ideological effort to destroy schools in America.

Education was always key to the American Experiment. Back when the founders were trying to figure out how to make this democracy thing work Jefferson said: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.” But over the later 20th century and the beginning of this one, our commitment to an educated electorate faltered. We stopped seeing it as a process to create citizens, and started seeing it only in terms of creating workers.

The Reivisionaries Movie poster

It’s a good and painful watch

There’s a documentary movie that I’ve been recommending to people since the election. Made by PBS in 2012, The Revisionaries tells a story of some of the people who laid the groundwork for shift to ignorance: the Texas Board of Education.

You can see if here, and it’s well worth your time. In this story a Young Earth Christian dentist named Don McLeroy fights science education. He battles textbook publishers, sometimes sentence by sentence, to shape the education of Texas children, and by extension much of America. (Texas is a big enough market to drive enough sales that places like Delaware or Montana don’t get as much influence.) In this story he is dogged and effective, and it’s both painful and impressive to watch him fight. He’s not alone — the Christian Right has been fighting for years to reshape science, history, and all aspects of education for all American children, and they’ve largely succeeded. Along the way, they have wrecked so many American minds.

The story of the Revisionaries fits into a broader story of how destroying education has destroyed an electorate, and possibly now, a nation. These last decades have seen concerted attacks on education. Nowhere was this more obvious than the state of Texas, as The Revisionaries documented. But it also took the form of chronic under-investment in education all over the nation. Under-investment that went on for decades, as well as charter and private school scams perpetrated by the Right Wing against American children. School vouchers promised to let kids attend better schools than the public schools America was once so rightfully proud of, further degrading the resources for public education. A lack of supervision at private and charter schools that accepted vouchers has meant that they often lag even behind their underfunded public rivals. The American Right knew that if you capture the children, you capture the future, and they worked on that.

It was also our bad luck that this under-investment in education coincided with one of the greatest media revolutions in history, if not the greatest: the invention and popularization of the Internet. Social media, online publishing, endless information are amazing; they are superpowers. Our smartphones are like the wands in the Harry Potter universe, opening up endless possibilities, and the chance to see the world as a whole in a way we never have before. Ideas and media can romp around the world in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. But there’s no Hogwarts for the internet: we just gave everyone superpowers and hoped for the best.

It has been a disaster on many levels, but most painfully it has been a human rights disaster. The first genocide organized on Facebook killed Rohingya in Myanmar in 2016, while hundreds of thousands fled to Bangladesh. Russian political interference all over the world capitalized on the internet and its terrible security. Various crashes of cryptocurrency bankrupted people too confused to know what they’d bought, all just to name a few notable internet driven catastrophes. To talk about them all would take books, but you can probably think of your own; anything from Enron to Pets.com to Bored Apes.

The statistics of our electorate are discouraging. After these decades of under-investment in schools, communities, and ESL resources, more than half of adults can’t read at a level required for a healthy democracy. A Gallup study of Department of Education data found that 54% of U.S. adults, aged 16 to 74 years old, have 6th grade or lower reading comprehension. That’s 130 million people who cannot read at a high school level. They are not up to the technical challenge of reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. But they are now on the internet hours a day, interacting with algorithmic content that increasingly creates the whole context of their lives without many of these citizens ever knowing how any of it works, or works on them.

Math Might Be Even Worse

We're way down in the PISA math rankings internationally.

Math education in America: it’s not going well.

Math literacy and education are in even worse condition. Understanding the issues we face living in an informational internet landscape requires numeracy — especially in statistics. Our news stories, and even this very article requires some understanding of probability, ratios, and change over time. We need to know whether a number being reported is small, large or even meaningful. We live on the internet now, and the internet is mathematical in nature. Media reports in statistics every day, whether it’s studies, or the effects of policies, or even the weather, which is becoming increasingly dangerous. We need to be able to interpret statistics and other numbers on the fly to even understand headlines, like 54% of people can’t read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In this election the case that broke me wasn’t Trump. It was Proposition 6 in California. In the alleged greatest left-leaning bastion of the nation, people were voting on convict slavery. And they voted, by a clear majority, for slavery. One of the reasons given for this dumbfounding and reprehensible loss was that the language of the proposition was too complicated. The proposition was about Involuntary Servitude, which the campaigners realized too late many people would not understand was a fancy term for slavery. In Nevada, where the term slavery was used, a similar measure passed. It could be that Californians are just far more right wing and pro-slavery than we ever realized, but there’s another explanation.

California voters didn’t know what the phrase “Involuntary Servitude” meant and couldn’t work it out while filling out a ballot.

The Only Way is Through

Founded in 1980.

We knew that our system required universal literacy and education for voters from the beginning of the American experiment. James Madison said “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” The founders focused on creating an education system for their voters. As the definition of voter widened, so did the need for universal public education. There was a time when our particular universal public education system was the envy of the world, despite its flaws. Particularly in the first half of the 20th century, the post war period, and the Civil Rights era, we focused on universal literacy and basic math and science education. We brought more people than ever into a culture of knowledge, and standards rose. It was never good enough, but for a time, we lead the world’s march towards universal literacy.

But by the end of the 20th century, that system was failing. Several studies and reports such as the 1983 ‘A Nation at Risk‘ showed that literacy wasn’t keeping up with the population. Math skills were increasing, but there were always questions about the curriculum, and whether it was fit for purpose. It might be that Americans are bad at math because American schools are bad at teaching math, but there’s also no real movement for reform.

This election is a disaster that will take many years to unwind. But the key is education. Without fixing education, we can’t fix our country. But we have also been trained by our media to demand quick fixes, and there might not be any quick fixes available here. Rebuilding an educational system is the work of many, done over decades. But it’s also the only way to have, or possibly one day regain, a democracy.

Amid Global Threats that Remain (Publicly) Unspeakable, Trump Makes Himself Vulnerable

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Christopher Wray and Alejandro Mayorkas managed to get Republicans and Democrats to agree yesterday — in condemning the two men after they blew off two public Global Threats hearings.

Top officials from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security on Thursday drew bipartisan fire for declining to testify in public at a Senate hearing on “worldwide threats” and instead offering to testify in a classified setting.

Both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security Committee expressed anger at what they called Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s “refusal” to testify in public.

“In a shocking departure from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s longstanding tradition of transparency and oversight of the threats facing our nation, for the first time in more than 15 years, the Homeland Security and FBI Director have refused to appear before the Committee to provide public testimony at our annual hearing on Threats to the Homeland,” Chairman Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, said in a statement.

The jilted members of Congress (and NBC’s Ken Dilanian) seemed to believe the snub was simply defensive. And while I wouldn’t blame either Wray or Mayorkas for wanting to limit their public statements in advance of leaving government and being targeted by Trump’s vengeance machine, it’s possible that the two men had stuff to say that simply couldn’t be said in public.

Given Mark Warner’s alarming commentary about China’s hack of the US telecom system and the shared jurisdiction Wray and Mayorkas would have had over that investigation, that’s could be part of the explanation (though as a telecom guy, Warner’s alarm may simply reflect his better knowledge of the exposure here).

The Chinese government espionage campaign that has deeply penetrated more than a dozen U.S. telecommunications companies is the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history — by far,” a senior U.S. senator told The Washington Post in an interview this week.

The hackers, part of a group dubbed Salt Typhoon, have been able to listen in on audio calls in real time and have in some cases moved from one telecom network to another, exploiting relationships of “trust,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a former telecom venture capitalist. Warner added that intruders are still in the networks.

Though fewer than 150 victims have been identified and notified by the FBI — most of them in the D.C. region, the records of people those individuals have called or sent text messages to run into the “millions,” he said, “and that number could go up dramatically.”

Those records could provide further information to help the Chinese identify other people whose devices they want to target, he said. “My hair’s on fire,” Warner said.

Those details, some previously undisclosed, add to the alarming understanding of the scope of the hack since late September, when the U.S. government, after being alerted by industry, began to grasp its seriousness. “The American people need to know” how serious the intrusion is, Warner said.

The hackers targeted the phones of Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, as well as people working for the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris and State Department officials.

The world is a mess right now. Donald Trump’s victory makes it likely that authoritarians around the world will defeat the Western order — with Trump thrown scraps by those holding leverage, and phone intercepts, over him.

Which is why Trump’s paranoia about the American “Deep State” is so foolish.

WaPo last week reported on the many transition services Trump has eschewed because those same services caught him engaging in misconduct last time around. Trump won’t work with General Services Administration because in 2017 they turned over emails showing that Trump had secret contacts with Russia during the transition.

Presidential transitions are formally led by the GSA, which typically provides furnished office space and computer support to both nominees for pre-election planning.

Trump won’t use State Department translators because transcripts leaked in his first term.

In calls with foreign heads of state, Trump has cut out the State Department, its secure lines and its official interpreters.

[snip]

Government officials also traditionally rely on State to help create an official record of such conversations, in case disputes arise over what was said.

Trump’s calls have raised alarms from some foreign policy experts — particularly his call with Vladimir Putin. He advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe, as The Washington Post reported. The absence of an official transcript of the exchange already has created a challenge for Trump, said Daniel Fried, a retired diplomat now at the Atlantic Council think tank, because the Kremlin quickly denied that the call had taken place.

“It would be a lot easier for the Trump team if he were able to say that the Russia team was lying,” said Fried, who played key roles in designing American policy in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. “So there’s a cost to doing it this way. People are scratching their heads and saying, ‘Somebody’s lying.’”

Trump doesn’t want the FBI vetting his nominees because they found disqualifying details on people like Jared (and it should be said but WaPo does not, Johnny McEntee and Boris Epshteyn).

As his team considers hundreds of potential appointees for key jobs, he’s so far declined to let the Federal Bureau of Investigation check for potential red flags and security threats to guard against espionage — instead relying on private campaign lawyers for some appointees and doing no vetting at all for others. Trump’s transition team is considering moving on his first day in office to give those appointees blanket security clearances, according to people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

Trump won’t sign the Presidential Transition Act’s ethics code because, well, he has every intent on looting government for his own profit.

Trump’s team says its staffers have signed their own ethics code and conflict-of-interest pledge, although those documents do not cover Trump or meet the requirements of the Presidential Transition Act. Transition officials said they continue to “constructively engage” with the Biden administration, but have not provided details of the negotiations.

As a result, Trump can’t access the hardened facilities that would protect his people from known, ongoing operations by Iranian and Chinese hackers.

Trump’s transition teams cannot participate in national security briefings, enter federal agencies or speak with employees, and can’t receive formal briefings about ongoing operations and projects. (Trump has begun receiving intelligence briefings.) The transition team cannot use secure federal email servers to communicate (a particular concern, security experts said, after the Trump campaign was hacked by Iran).

Trump hates his own government so much, he makes himself an easy target for hostile governments and disloyal appointees. Hell, he couldn’t even get Pete Hegseth to honestly disclose the sexual assault allegation against him.

What Trump will do to the United States is awful.

But because he hates the US government so much, he’ll also make “America First” wildly vulnerable to hostile forces, at a time when they’re already poised to undercut America’s strength.

It’s why he’s such a godsend to hostile countries: Because he will serve as a cancer within the US government, deliberately eating away at America’s defenses from inside.

Yes, Trump Plans to Flush NATO, But It’s Part of a Larger Whole

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Note, 1:40 ET: Folks, I know this is bad timing, but in about 20 minutes, I’m going to temporarily shut down comments here, as we’re going to do some planned maintenance. Hopefully it won’t take too long. 

When Donald Trump announced he had selected Matt Whitaker as his Ambassador to NATO, a bunch of people rushed over here to hear me say Big Dick Toilet Salesman* again.

Like most of Trump’s other nominees, Whitaker is wildly unqualified for the role. Actual diplomats may be able to exploit his inexperience. Likely, he’ll wander around Europe like Gordon Sondland did, doing personal errands for Trump, often involving grift. Unlike most of Trump’s nominees, Whitaker has at least been able to get and sustain security clearance in the past.

But I really think BDTS is not where our attention should focus.

Yes, there are reasons to focus on Trump’s five most outrageous nominees, but not always for the main reasons they’re wildly unqualified.

It matters that Russia keeps calling Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump wants to lead the entire Intelligence Community, their girlfriend. But just as important, Nikki Haley has made an issue of Tulsi’s nomination — focusing on Iran, not Russia.

It matters that RFK Jr would pursue policies that would kill more children, just like he did in Samoa. But it’s worth recalling that RFK made more pointed attacks on red states than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris ever did.

Pete Hegseth is unqualified both because of his Christian nationalism and the NDA he got with a woman who told police he had raped her (his attorney, Tim Parlatore, says the sex was consensual). But it matters just as much that Hegseth hid the alleged assault from Trump’s flimsy vetting process, raising questions among Trump’s team about his candor.

She said Hegseth took her phone and blocked the door with his body when she tried to leave. She told police she said “no” repeatedly. She said she was next on a bed or a couch and Hegseth was on top of her, with his dog tags hovering over her face. Hegseth, she said, ejaculated on her stomach.

Even the focus on evidence of Matt Gaetz’ alleged sex trafficking — something likely to be aired anyway in two month’s time, not least because JD Vance’s disclosure that Trump plans to replace Chris Wray means Wray will have no incentive to refuse Democratic Senators’ requests for more information on the investigation — distracts from the larger effort, focusing on sordid Venmo payments rather than Gaetz’ willingness to sustain conspiracy theories that have been debunked.

Donald Trump’s wildly inappropriate nominations taken one by one, like Nancy Mace’s grotesque attack on Sarah McBride (and Fox News’ lies that McBride, not Mace, started the fight), serve to distract from the larger issue: Trump’s wholesale effort to dismantle the Federal government’s commitment to serve Americans not named Donald Trump or African immigrants named Elon Musk — or Russians named Vladimir Putin.

That’s why Musk is an exception to my claim of distraction. Thus far, I am far less intrigued by claimed tensions around Musk than others like Gaetz — I think it is too early to tell whether Musk has enough leverage over Trump to withstand complaints that he is stealing the thunder from the boss. It doesn’t hurt to play them up, but I have a hunch they won’t work like they normally would. But Musk’s conflicts most readily convey the looting that is at the core of this effort. It should be easy to show how the selection of Brendon Carr as FCC head will not only pose a risk to the First Amendment in the US, but would also provide specific, personalized benefits to Musk’s Starlink. It should be easy to use Musk as an exemplar of the point of all this, which has nothing to do with “woke” or bathrooms or “free speech,” but is, instead, about looting.

Taken individually and as a whole, Republicans — at least the Senators — are in an awkward spot. They are being asked whether they support America, or whether they will irretrievably stop serving their constituents as their President dismantles decades of government benefits. Each instance of discomfort created by Trump’s picks, whether it is Trump’s own team’s belief that Hegseth hid something or Haley’s attack on Tulsi from the right or generalized loathing of Matt Gaetz, provides a discomfort that may lead Republicans to stand up. Each instance of an incompetent crony (and I include Whitaker in that list) being placed in a position where he’s more likely to seek personal benefit he’ll have motive to protect by dutifully implementing whatever Trump orders should be a way to show that Senators have sold out their constituents.

But thus far, Trump has brilliantly done what he always does: used a series of distractions to drown out any coherent discussion of the whole.

It is usually a good bet to assume Republicans will fail to exhibit the integrity or self-preservation when it most matters. But the stakes are too high not to do everything we can to try to change that.

And that starts by maintaining focus on the whole rather than the endless series of new outrageous distractions.

*Note, I did not make up this nickname, though it’s a good one. I merely helped popularize it.