The bubbling Jeffrey Epstein scandal is about two things: the underlying scandal and any ties Trump has to it, and the way it has disrupted Trump’s normal super power ability to command and direct attention.

His attack on Rosie O’Donnell yesterday shows that his ability to direct the attention of the left remains undiminished and makes clear why this power is so important to Trump.

Trump’s attack on the comedian, just hours before his latest inept intervention in the Epstein matter, came in the wake of a number of stories — the NYT story describing that key National Weather Service positions were vacant when the flood hit,  the CNN report on a three day delay that Kristi Noem caused in the search and rescue, reports on Kerr County’s refusal to accept a Dem-funded early warning system that Rayne wrote up here, the NYT story describing how Noem cut off funding to a call center while it was fielding calls from survivors — holding Trump’s Administration or Republicans accountable for exacerbating the impact of the flood.

When Trump tweeted that Rosie O’Donnell “is a Threat to Humanity” and claimed to be considering stripping her citizenship (she lives in Dublin but as far as I know does not yet have Irish citizenship), that post circulated wildly among journalists and the left, sometimes with commentary about how grave a threat it was that Trump would even make such threats (which he has no legal power to carry out).

But the people who gaped at his unfiltered tweet did not explain, much less link, the background.

Trump attacked O’Donnell as predictions she made on TikTok last Sunday, which the right wing has been trying to dismiss by shaming her, were being confirmed by those press reports.

What a horror story in Texas — the flash floods in Texas. The Guadalupe River. 51 missing. 51 dead, more missing. Children … at a camp. And you know when the President guts all the warning systems and the, uh, weathering [sic] forecast abilities of the government, these are the results that we’re going to start to see on a daily basis, because he’s put this country in so much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions and this ridiculously immoral bill that he just signed into law. As Republicans cheered. As Republicans cheered. People will die as a result and they’ve started already. Shame on him. Shame on every GOP sycophant who’s listening and following the disastrous decisions of this mentally incapacitated POTUS.

Rosie O’Donnell made a powerful moral critique of Trump, and as that critique was bearing out, he responded to it by asserting to have power over her, power he doesn’t have. And rather than focusing on or even mentioning that moral critique — or even continuing to focus on the many ways the Trump Administration did exacerbate the flood — those who disseminated his tweet gaped in horror at his spectacular display of power, without identifying it as an attempt to avoid being held accountable.

Whether or not the US can restore democracy depends heavily on the success that Trump’s critics have in tying his failures to disasters like Kerr County. It depends on their ability to remain laser-focused on holding him accountable for the disasters his actions predictably cause. And Trump squelched the words of one prescient critic with a tweet. He did so with the willful cooperation of data mules on the left.

Trump’s ability to command and direct attention — his ability to rupture context and redirect attention to his own claims of authority — is his super power. It is how he has attained and remained in government; it is how he has beat back scandals that would have doomed others.

And that super power has been failing him as his DOJ and FBI reversed course on past fevered promises to disclose everything about the Epstein scandal.

That’s what, I have tried to argue, has always been missing from reporting on this exchange: how badly Trump flubbed a role, suppressing coverage by bullying a journalist, that is second nature to him.

Pam Bondi sets out to answer two questions from a journalist about Epstein. She’s actually good at this performed competence and had Trump just let her answer he might have avoided all the backlash. But Trump interrupts. He stumbles over delivery of the name, Jeffrey Epstein, as if he is trying to perform disgust, but it sounds hollow. He asks a question — “are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein” — that feigns ignorance of both the importance of the Epstein scandal to his base, to say nothing about how much his chosen aides, Bondi, Dan Bongino, and Kash Patel, have themselves never shut up about Epstein. Trump almost regains his footing when he complains that the journalist isn’t focused on Texas or “this” (huh? what is “this”?); Trump almost regains his footing by bullying a journalist, an easy trope for him. But then he tries to perform disgust again — “this creep” — and like the earlier mention of his friend, Epstein’s name, “creep” sounds forced, a badly delivered performance. Trump tries a familiar stance again — “I can’t believe you’re asking a question about Epstein” — but this was a question about a release Bondi’s own DOJ orchestrated. He ends with feigned outrage, accusing the journalist of “desecration.” The whole performance lacked energy, exacerbated by the slurring Trump exhibited throughout the event.

What is a normal ploy from him — attacking journalists to bully them out of covering things — simply failed. The great Realty TV Show Star flubbed his part, as devastating as if his voice squeaked when declaring “You’re fired,” back in the day.

Both in content and performance, his bid to shut down this line of questioning made him look vulnerable, not strong. It raised questions rather than silencing them.

With each development since — the clash between Dan Bongino and Bondi over who would take the fall first revealed in reports of Bongino’s pouty refusal to go to work on Friday, the persistent backlash from some of the loudest voices among his Twitter mob, leading up to Trump’s lengthy tweet yesterday — Trump’s command of attention has slipped.

While folks finally recognized that something is failing in Trump’s normal ability to command attention, this time, by gaping at the length of this tweet, if you look closer, the tweet was even more delightfully ill-conceived.

Both right wingers and journalists have, I think correctly, conceived the purpose as an attempt to alleviate pressure on Pam Bondi.

What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!

[snip]

LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!

But even there, Trump starts pathetically, by claiming that “my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?'” are leading the attack on Bondi. This attack, on “Blondi,” is being led by Laura Loomer, and suggesting that she’s following Trump’s “boys” on this betrays a reluctance to go after Loomer directly.

The defense of Kash Patel (right wingers correctly noticed that Bongino gets no mention) is secondary.

Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein.

That mention builds on the drop dead stupidity of this post — one so stupid that even Benny Johnson noticed it.

For the first time ever, Trump claimed that the Epstein files were made up by Democrats — all Democrats, serially.

Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands.

To be fair, this is not an entirely new ploy. Last year, Trump explained his hesitation to release the Epstein files based on a claim that “it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”

I guess I would. I think that, less so, because, you know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.

Even then, he was preparing a defense that if something in there implicated him, it was phony, fake, fraudulent.

Still, the claim that Democrats — Obama, Hillary, John Brennan, and Jim Comey (who is not a Democrat, or at least wasn’t when this all happened) — created the Epstein files would normally be a reasonable ploy, given the disinformation he has long used to sustain loyalty. He attempted to tie the Epstein files to things he has trained his rubes to believe were hoaxes — the legal adjudications that Trump’s top aides lied to cover up his ties to Russia and false claims about what 51 spooks said about the Hunter Biden laptop — as well as an actual hoax (the Steele dossier) that he has blamed on Democrats rather than the Russians who larded it with allegations that closely match real things only the Russians knew.

These things — Russia Russia Russia — are a foundational element of his tweets (and one of the things data mules disseminate without debunking, thereby reinforcing as unquestioned). This was an attempt to add one more element, as he added the spook letter and Hunter Biden laptop after Russia Russia Russia was already established as his foundational disinformation.

So this might have been a reasonable attempt to discredit the Epstein files, the things he anticipated claiming were “phony” last year. Except you don’t attempt this after years of treating it as credible.

Worse still, you don’t do that and then immediately ask the question that MAGAts have long used to reassure themselves that Trump wasn’t in the Epstein files.

Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it?

Why didn’t they, indeed?

Again, even Benny has seen the problem with this, and he is painfully stupid!

The reason Trump’s claims that the Russian investigation and the spook letter and the Steele dossier are hoaxes have succeeded is because they were made public, often with the involvement of Democrats. But if Democrats — even Hillary, whose spouse flew on his plane! — larded the Epstein files with things damaging Trump, right wingers’ biases dictate that the left would have released it.

Before Trump’s claims that these were fabricated, the logic made sense to right wingers: Democrats didn’t release the files because there’s nothing about Trump in them. But if the left allegedly fabricated them along with the Russian investigation and the spook letter, which Trump has falsely claimed were fabricated in an attempt to hurt Trump, then they would have released them.

Furthermore, he would order Kash to include the Epstein files among the witch hunts on which he wants FBI to focus. Instead, he’s arguing that Kash doesn’t have time to investigate this alleged hoax targeting him because he is too busy investigating other fabricated claims of a hoax, his desperate attempt to find some way to sustain the claim that he’s not a loser beaten by Joe Biden in 2020.

The entire post collapses in on itself. Even Benny sees this! 

And that’s before something else Trump attempted. Trump told his rubes — a huge cross-section of which is QAnon adjacent — that nobody cares about Jeffrey Epstein.

Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.

Crazier still, when he first attempted this complaint, he used a phrase that is bound to fuel conspiracists.

“selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein never dies?!?! Did you really say that? About a guy whose circumstances of death are a key part of this conspiracy theory? Hell, the most unhinged Epstein conspiracists (including a good number of Trump supporters) question whether he did die. And you just wrote down that Jeffrey Epstein never dies?!?!

Trump’s supporters are in a cult. But many of them are also in the QAnon cult. And for those for whom the QAnon cult came first or remains predominant, telling them that “nobody cares about” Jeffrey Epstein ruptures the unity between Trump and them, because he is attacking one of their foundational beliefs. It’s like telling devout Christians that Jesus never walked the Earth. You have just assailed a foundational belief of those who believe — as proven by Epstein — that pedophiles control the powerful. So long as Trump flirted with QAnon conspiracies, he and his rubes shared that foundational belief; yesterday, he assailed it.

(Both Phil Bump and Mike Rothschild addressed what happens when you betray the trust of conspiracists back when Bongino first affirmed that Epstein killed himself; the description anticipated what we’re seeing this week.)

There certainly are questions about what aspects of Trump’s sustained fondness for Epstein remain in files that once might have been on Pam Bondi’s desk before they weren’t and never had been, according to Bondi. It’s certainly likely that something in them explains the failure of Trump’s super power here, his inability to deliver his long-practiced lines, first of bullying a journalist, then claiming Dems implicated him in a hoax.

But the reason why his super power is failing doesn’t matter so long as it does continue to fail, especially given that Epstein conspiracies were always non-falsifiable and Trump’s conflicting stories make them all the more so. Unless something drastically changes, every attempt Trump makes to squelch this focus will only exacerbate the growing cognitive dissonance his rubes have. And the underlying Epstein scandal is so spectacular — so unquestionably a case of injustice to the victims — that even feckless Dems have the means of keeping it at the forefront.

Trump survives based on that super power, on his ability (as he succeeded in doing with the Rosie O’Donnell tweet) to dodge accountability by distracting away from it.

If that super power starts to fail, though, so will his ability to avoid accountability.

Listen on spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

I was and still intend to write a post arguing that all of the coverage of this comment from Trump is wrong. As I rant on Nicole Sandler’s show today, what we saw in these few moments was Trump, whose super power is in being able to command attention, not only failing that, but flubbing his lines when he tried to reassert his command over attention focused on Jeffrey Epstein.

The conspiracy theorists who put Trump in office will not let him take ahold of this conspiracy.

What we see in this exchange is — more than at any time in the last ten years, I argue — Trump’s super power of commanding where people focus their attention failing him.

So I want to write about how everyone is getting this wrong.

But first, I want to talk about how Trump’s Deep State can’t even Deep State competently.

Trump’s attempt to tamp this down, predictably, had the opposite effect, both because infighting over who fucked up the incompetent attempt to tamp it down, and the conspiracy theories that have arisen in the void.

Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer is at the pivot of both worlds, and she’s playing her part to perfection. She started things today by revealing that Dan Bongino — who actually doesn’t like how hard he has to work at FBI anyway — complaining about how the memo that attempted but failed to tamp all this down happened.

That led Todd Blanche, fresh off his efforts to make the Erez Reuveni disclosures worse, to weigh in, claiming there was no dispute about how to release the Epstein memo.

Meanwhile, Marc Caputo — who has close ties with Susie Wiles from way back — debunks Blanche’s claim of harmony,  describing that Wiles and Taylor Budowich witnessed anything but.

The intrigue: MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, a Bondi critic, first reported Friday on X that Bongino left work and that he and Patel were “furious” with the way Bondi had handled the case.

• Some Trump advisers have criticized Bondi, but Trump “loves Pam and thinks she’s great,” a senior White House official said.
• Those witnessing the Wednesday clash between Bondi and Bongino in the White House were Patel, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich.

The more important part of Caputo’s report, though, is that insiders blame Bongino for the “missing minute,” which provided the nutters reason to doubt the entire effort to tamp all this down.

Zoom in: At the center of the argument: a surveillance video from outside Epstein’s cell that the administration released, saying it was proof no one had entered the room before he killed himself.

• The 10-hour video had what has widely been called a “missing minute,” fueling conspiracy theories in MAGA’s online world about a cover-up involving Epstein’s death.
• The “missing minute,” authorities say, stemmed from an old surveillance recording system that goes down each day at midnight to reset and record anew. It takes a minute for that process to occur, which effectively means that 60 seconds of every day aren’t recorded.
• Bongino — who had pushed Epstein conspiracy theories as a MAGA-friendly podcast host before President Trump appointed him to help lead the FBI — had found the video and touted it publicly and privately as proof that Epstein hadn’t been murdered.

That conclusion — shared by FBI Director Kash Patel, another conspiracy theorist-turned-insider — angered many in Trump’s MAGA base, criticism that increased after Axios first reported the release of the video and a related memo.

• After the video’s “missing minute” was discovered, Bongino was blamed internally for the oversight, according to three sources.

Only, complaints about the video are only going to get worse. Wired describes that the metadata shows the video has been altered.

The “raw” file shows clear signs of having been processed using an Adobe product, most likely Premiere, based on metadata that specifically references file extensions used by the video editing software. According to experts, Adobe software, including Premiere and Photoshop, leaves traces in exported files, often embedding metadata that logs which assets were used and what actions were taken during editing. In this case, the metadata indicates the file was saved at least four times over a 23-minute span on May 23, 2025, by a Windows user account called “MJCOLE~1.” The metadata does not show whether the footage was modified before each time it was saved.

The embedded data suggest the video is not a continuous, unaltered export from a surveillance system, but a composite assembled from at least two separate MP4 files. The metadata includes references to Premiere project files and two specific source clips—2025-05-22 21-12-48.mp4 and 2025-05-22 16-35-21.mp4. These entries appear under a metadata section labeled “Ingredients,” part of Adobe’s internal schema for tracking source material used in edited exports. The metadata does not make clear where in the video the two clips were spliced together.

Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on digital forensics and misinformation, reviewed the metadata at WIRED’s request. Farid is a recognized expert in the analysis of digital images and the detection of manipulated media, including deepfakes. He has testified in numerous court cases involving digital evidence.

Farid says the metadata raises immediate concerns about chain of custody—the documented handling of digital evidence from collection to presentation in a courtroom. Just like physical evidence, he explains, digital evidence must be handled in a way that preserves its integrity; metadata, while not always precise, can provide important clues about whether that integrity has been compromised.

“If a lawyer brought me this file and asked if it was suitable for court, I’d say no. Go back to the source. Do it right,” Farid says. “Do a direct export from the original system—no monkey business.”

Farid points to another anomaly: The video’s aspect ratio shifts noticeably at several points. “Why am I suddenly seeing a different aspect ratio?” he asks.

It is abundantly likely that all of this is easily explained. I noted in my first post that the missing minute probably comes from MCC’s ancient surveillance equipment. And it sounds like someone packaged this up for Bongino.

Of course, none of that is going to matter if and when people confirm that the video doesn’t even show Epstein’s cell, as multiple people claim.

Every single wrinkle will only serve to feed the conspiracy theorists whose attention Trump cannot manage to command.

Here’s the thing, though. I think Bondi probably did shut down these investigations because they are inconvenient to Trump. Maybe it stems from nothing more than Trump’s demand to command attention; maybe it has to do with the known connections between Trump and the abuser looking damning no matter how close or far Trump is to the rape.

But because the Deputy Director of the FBI, an agency with thousands of people with expertise on this kind of thing, couldn’t manage to find someone who could hold his hand and explain basic things like chain of custody, they have all made it far, far worse.

Trump’s Deep State can’t even Deep State competently.

Update: The date of the saved video (May 23) was between the date when Bongino and Kash told Bartiromo that Epstein killed himself and the date when Bongino told Fox the FBI was going to release the video but first was, “taking time to clean up and enhance the video.”

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Children died to own the libs.

Or children died because something-something-taxes-property-freedom.

Perhaps both – it could depend on your interpretation of the decisions made in Kerr County, Texas leading up to the inarguable, preventable deaths of children due to flash flooding last week.

Never tell me the GOP is the party of life because they refuse to govern in a way that protects life.

They would rather kill children to make a point that liberalism and democracy aren’t acceptable to them.

Others have expressed rage about Kerr County’s child sacrifices far more eloquently; Charlotte Clymer tells the thoughts-and-prayers crowd Do Not Put This On God because none of this was God’s plan.

Journalists in major news outlets have reported on the flash flood in Kerr County without being blunt about the immoral choices national, state, and local GOP elected or aligned government personnel made leading to child deaths. No one will be held accountable based on the wide swags they’ve made as to fault.

What really galls me is the public relations campaign slowly mounting to put down the complaints born of anger, grief, and frustration, using these deaths as yet another sacrifice on the altar of fascism.

Charlie Kirk takes a note out of Chris Rufo’s playbook blaming an Austin TX fire chief for fire and emergency response leading to mass child death, claiming the chief was a DEI hire.

Oh no, honey, no. Don’t go looking to blame DEI for the deaths, because the root cause was much earlier and DEI wasn’t the problem.

There are receipts.

Snapshot of top post at https://mstdn.social/@[email protected]/114812383563824176

The replies beneath the post above share the 2016 engineering report on the installation of a flood warning system in Kerr County.

But further in replies utterly damning bits are shared. They were laid out in a Reddit post which I’ll share here (thanks to Reddit contributor timubce in r/Texas).

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 06/27/16

COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: You know we had a baby flood a couple weeks ago, a month or so, whatever it was. And I keep hearing these reports of the old, old system, and I know we’re not going to deal with that though. Expect that to be gone where the Jones call the Smiths, and the Smiths call Camp Rio Vista, and Rio Vista blah, blah, blah, along down the line. But it’s still there and it still works. The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.

COMMISSIONER MOSER: I think — I think this and that’s what the committee is going to look at and how to do it. I think the going in position is that we don’t need to change anything, and is there a need to improve what we have. And if there’s a need to improve how much is improved. And what the options for doing that and what it would cost. And I think the first thing to do is say why change anything. It worked this long and maybe we don’t need to do a thing. And then it gets into the thing we talk about earlier today, and that’s risk mitigation. And you know there’s still people drowned and you know —
COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: And I hope you ask the question like who are we notifying, or who are we trying to get the message to? Are they these crazy people from Houston that build homes right down on the water?
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Well, I think the thing is you say it’s for the general public and the crazy people from wherever they are, from Houston, okay, and then the camps, and then how do you get the message out to those, that’s all part of it, so it’s a pretty complex project.
COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: I’m sure it is.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: And the question is do we need to do anything. And what do we want to do and what can we afford.
MRS. STEBBINS: Commissioner Moser, will you put it on the next agenda for discussion after you have this meeting on Thursday?
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Oh, absolutely, right.
MRS. STEBBINS: Okay, thank you.
JUDGE POLLARD: I would comment that we don’t hardly have any crazy people that live here. The few that we do have we handle them through CSU.
COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: Or they serve on this board.
JUDGE POLLARD: I’m just trying to keep us out of trouble here, okay. The media’s still here. All right. Any other reports?

************ /end edit

In 2016 Kerr County contracted for an engineering study on their current warning system and were told it was antiquated and inadequate.

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 8/22/16

COMMISSIONER MOSER: We had at our steering committee meeting we invited also TxDOT to participate in that. So the original engineer, and both of them as a matter of fact showed up at that meeting. Their assessment was what existed today, and the Sheriff may want to comment on it, is antiquated and it’s not reliable. So we said okay with that, you know, not just that, but we thought that there was a pretty ill-defined system that we have. So the engineering study we thought would be appropriate. If the result of the engineering study says that — recommends that we enhance the system, okay, buying additional sensors, kind of like Comal County did. Comal County spent a little over three hundred thousand dollars, where they had add 8 locations to monitor the rate of rise of the river and streams.

COMMISSIONER REEVES: And while I agree with Commissioner Letz, that if we have a system that’s not working, we need to certainly look at that, technology is great, but still one of the best things, and you may disagree with me is the people up river calling. Because you’re probably going to get a call. I’ve received just this year from calls before it’s even had time for a warning to go off, I’m getting texts from Divide Fire Chief, and I think — where’d the Sheriff go? I sent you a text the other night, you may have got it too from him, but we’re knowing probably before, and I know with one flood that we had earlier in the year, by the time you got the warnings going off, it had been too late. Because it was coming out of just some draws that took too long to get downstream.

COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: I have one. I’m going to vote no because of numerous reasons. I think this whole thing is a little extravagant for Kerr County, and I see the word sirens and all that stuff in here. And of course, you say that these are steps that will be taken through the years. But that’s where you’re headed, there’s no question in my mind that’s where you’re headed. And you’re determined to do that. But step one of taking these funds out of special projects, out of Road and Bridge, that ticks me off a little bit.

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 10/24/16

Mr. Hewitt: Sirens did not seem to get very much support. The thought was that sirens are better for tourists than local residents. The sirens would only be beneficial for someone that’s not familiar with the area, and wouldn’t know what to do.

The second part of the study contained recommendations for updating the system and sirens were purposely left out even though other areas had implemented them.

Regular Commissioners’ Court Agenda 01/09/17

Comal County has implemented a river guage and siren system that includes New Braunfels, Guadalupe County and the Water-Oriented Recreation District (WORD) as funding partners. When gauge heights reach a certain level, emergency management personnel are notified and the siren is automatically activated. Emergency personnel can also activiate the sirens remotely if they know flood water is headed downstream. The data from each gauge, including river height and rainfall, is avaiable online for anyone, including residents, to access.
The filed for federal assistance via a Hazard Mitigation Grant for 976k.

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 01/09/17 Discussing the recommended warning system

COMMISSIONER MOSER: The cost of that whole thing is going to be like 976 thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money. All of it, and the reason we’re here today and moving so quickly is that there is a FEMA grant that’s available until as long as we apply by January the 20th.
JUDGE POLLARD: Which is when President Obama goes out of office.
(Laughter.)
JUDGE POLLARD: Well, the reason I mention that is because he authorized this particular thing, and it’s going to —
MS. KIRBY: It’s a coincidence.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Going on the record with that it’s a coincidence. And so there has to be a presidential declaration of disaster to be able to have these kinds of funds available. So it goes away just so happens to be when he leaves office.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: So we’ve talked about, you know one of the things we said sirens and we said we don’t want sirens, too many many people said they did not want sirens when they had these — when we had these gatherings. Code Red, and I don’t know if Dub wants to chime in on this, but Code Red is the same that’s going to get information to a lot of people; not to everybody, okay. One of the things that we’ll do is identify a point of contact in all of the camps, we won’t communicate with everybody in the camp, but we have a point of contact at the camp so that they can disseminate people within — to people within the camp, like during the summer when kids are there, or to RV parks. Now, if the RV parks want to have a siren themself when something goes up that’s up to them. That’s not part of our thing. So getting the information to the public is the end item of this whole thing. The first thing is sense a flood, then communicate that information to the local authorities, to the right authorities, and then for them to have a system by with which to disseminate the information to the public.

SHERIFF HIERHOLZER: The only thing I have to remind people, unfortunately, I guess I’m one of the ones that – Harley maybe has been around here to see some very devastating floods and quite a bit of loss of life. No matter what we do it’s going to be up to the public, okay. The notification is great. I think the — just the markers, the posts at the crossing is one thing, but it actually oughta state that at that level that your car may wash off, get people’s attention at that crossing. The only other thing is, and as Bob can attest to, most of the time it has been informal where we call people. Unfortunately, the time we had the most devastating one down on the east end of the County down at the camps, I was working that night, spent 72 hours pulling kids out of fences. But we call people, we called camps, they made the decision that they thought they could beat that ride, and then that no matter what we do and no matter what we install there’s going to be loss of life. It’s educating people.

COMMISSIONER REEVES: And I will say and, Sheriff, you can correct me if I’m off base on this, the camps have had a very good system of letting down river if there’s a rise, they’re phoning their competitors or colleagues down river and letting them know what happened. It’s informal as you said, but it’s been a very good system to let them know over time.
SHERIFF HIERHOLZER: Right. The camps and they do, they notify each other, we notify them, they notify — there’s a lot of informal things that really do work real well. It’s not totally those unless they try to get them out too quick in trying to beat it. Because this river can come up in a instant, we all know that with the drainage. But it will go down just as quick if they just hold tight with what they’ve got. But the whole key is just getting people that are traveling up here from somewhere —
COMMISSIONER REEVES: That’s my concern is ones that don’t live here.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: That’s everybody’s concern.
JUDGE POLLARD: So this is kind of an offer, or to see if it’s accepted by and also agreed to by UGRA and the City.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Correct.
JUDGE POLLARD: And if they don’t then where are we with this?
COMMISSIONER MOSER: If they don’t then we just forget the whole project.
JUDGE POLLARD: Just dead in the water.
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Dead in the water, right. It’s dead in the water.
COMMISSIONER REEVES: Question —
COMMISSIONER MOSER: Or the pun for the Flood Warning System.
JUDGE POLLARD: Dead in the water.
After failing to secure a grant, they continued to kick the can down the road.
2021 rolls around and they have over 5 mil in ARPA funds in their bank and wind up with a grand total of over 10 mil.

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 10/25/21 discussion of communication systems

COMMISSIONER LETZ: Well, I think that’s good. I just think that — you know, I’d like to get an idea of what the Sheriff’s radar systems are going to cost. I mean I just don’t want to send — go out and get public input on something and then us just not be able to follow up because we have a priority that’s different and we have additional information.
JUDGE KELLY: Well, but let me just explain. What all of these are intentioned to do is to initiate the education system. We need to get the Court educated. We need to get the public educated. Everybody knows that we have over $5 million sitting in our bank account that the Federal Government sent us for these ARPA funds. And they’re not really grants, they’re funds.
…
MRS. LAVENDER: And as the Judge said, there’s a huge category. There’s a bunch of things that you can spend the money or — or secure the money to spend. And when we use the term grant, grant is not really what this is. It’s just funding that’s been made available through this American Rescue Plan Act. It doesn’t require a match. It doesn’t require, you know, that kind of structure. But it does have strings attached. It’s not free money.
…
COMMISSIONER LETZ: And that’s my concern, Judge. My concern is that from my understanding what the — well, I won’t say LCRA because I know what their number is. The number from the Sheriff’s Department, the number from internal communications, we’re already over 5 million dollars, so I don’t want to go out to the public requesting — we have no money to do it.
COMMISSIONER BELEW: Well, at least we make the determination that that’s the first —
COMMISSIONER LETZ: Right. But —
COMMISSIONER BELEW: Then it’s done. But we haven’t made that determination.
COMMISSIONER LETZ: That’s why I think we need to get discuss that phase. We need to get those numbers — I mean, my opinion is law enforcement and the internal communications are the number one and two. I’m not sure which order. Probably law enforcement first. And — and I haven’t heard the rest of the Court say what their top two priorities are but —
COMMISSIONER HARRIS: Well, that’s mine. Because not only does it cover that, it — the Sheriff’s office, communications, getting it up to speed, and also the Volunteer Fire Departments and making sure that we can communicate with other counties. As we saw last winter, I mean, communications is one of our biggest weaknesses and there’s the Sheriff up. I’m sure he’ll back me up on that. Communications was a problem. Go ahead, Sheriff.
SHERIFF LEITHA: Yeah, I kind of agree with Jonathan, if you go that direction. Now, we had a meeting, did attend with LCRA, a very good meeting, just preliminary. Preliminary, I’m looking at $3 million for just me. That’s just us and — the Sheriff’s Office. That’s not including we have the constables, we have Animal Control, we have the fire department. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that needs to be checked into. Are we going to provide radios or not. But I can tell you, I mean, it kind of shocked me. But that was three million right off the bat. And — and that’s not even going into all the other agencies. Are we going to supply those radios, they’re very expensive, to all the fire departments or not. So this is something we really need to look into, if we want to go that direction with the new infrastructure. Also, visiting with the Chief on a daily basis, you know, that’s kind of the direction they’re going. I’ve requested to be on the same radio system they are. Only because the fire department dispatch is out of the County. But the radio system will be very expensive.

COMMISSIONER BELEW: And — but if we upgrade, we will also be able to communicate with the surrounding counties.
SHERIFF LEITHA: Yes. We will be. And it’s a very big project. You know, something that’s going to take some time. Very costly. And there’s a lot of questions, you know. We’re opening a can of worms, you know. We discussed we really need the volunteer fire department input. We’ve already gotten some kickback –I mean some — some — you know, and that’s why I didn’t open this can of worms. It’s going to be a long, drawn out process, you know, to do this. It can be done. But like I said, it’s very costly. Something I can say like Don asked me, I mean, in the long run in the five year we can save money. We pay over $300,000 a year in tower leases. So there is going to be some savings down the line, just to let you know.
And they still don’t update their flood warning system.

The people also didn’t want to spend any of the ARPA money because it was tied to the Biden administration. Even the Judge suggests just holding on to the money so that it can’t be sent to states that don’t share their same values. And now we have 10s of people who have died and many might have lived if the county had updated their flood warning system and installed flood sirens along the river like the multiple counties/towns around them did.

Commissioners’ Court Regular Session 11/08/21

Resident: Are you accountable to anyone for how you spend it? Or is it a, kind of, a reward and shows your support for this particular program? It’s not free money. Being present as we talk. How do we know this? Immediately. Unless you want it on the COVID lies and vaccination pressure, you have to send it back. Those are heavy strings. And those are strings. The deep state harangue and vilified President Trump for calling COVID for what it was and then suggest responses that were non-draconian, and then when Biden took office, the leftist government took its gloves off. It has lied and lied more about this COVID — about COVID.
The temptation is great, you’re accountable, and we would like to know where your allegiance is.
Resident 2: And I’m here to ask this Court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House. And Kerr County should not be accepting anything from these people. They’re currently facilitating an invasion of our border, and we’re going to support these people? So that’s what I have to say. Thank you.
Resident: I happen to know that there is no such thing as free money. It’s never government-funded; it’s tax-payer funded. So they’re taking our money and they’re putting strings attached to it and then they’re giving it back to us. And they’re going to get their foot in the door in this county. We don’t want their money. I feel like the people have spoken and I stand with the people. Thank you for your time.
COMMISSIONER BELEW: We have money in the bank, $5.1 million, that was sent to Kerr County.
JUDGE KELLY: We didn’t ask for it. They sent it.
COMMISSIONER BELEW: They sent it.
MS. DEWELL: Exactly.
COMMISSIONER BELEW: The money is in the bank right now. Hasn’t been spent. In the event that you don’t spend it, you send it back. That’s part of the Treasury’s rules on it. If you do spend it, whatever percentage, there would be no expense to the taxpayers in Kerr County. It would all come out of that account, no matter what you do with it.
JUDGE KELLY: And GrantWorks has been very helpful in — in getting us focused on what colors between the lines and what doesn’t. As of last Thursday, when I got a call from Bonnie White telling me about this — the problem that y’all were going to present at the meeting, I went and got on the telephone to their Senior Vice President from GrantWorks. And there — there are discussions that they want to have with us and so we want to sit down and listen to them. And we want — we want you to hear them, too. Because you’re the public. But we — we need to know and get very comfortable with where we are with this grant before we start taking that money. And the claw back was the first thing. As far as where that money sits for the next year or two, my old law partner John Cornyn tells me that if we send it back it’s going to New Jersey or it’s going to New York or it’s going to —
MRS. LAVENDER: Or California.
JUDGE KELLY: — or California. And so I don’t know if I’d rather be the custodian of the money until we decide what we have to do with it rather than giving it back to the government to spend it on values that we in Kerr County don’t agree with. So —
COMMISSIONER BELEW: And any spending of it would have to be done in Commissioners’ Court so you’ll be able to see it and know it.
They eventually signed a 7.5 mil contract with Motorola in 2022 for a county emergency communications system. The system would provide 95% radio coverage to firefighters, EMS and law enforcement.
But hey at least the UGRA has had developing a flood warning system on their Strategic Plan doc since 2022 which they kept rolling to the next year plan.

UGRA Strategic Plan 2025

B-2. Work with local partners to develop Kerr County flood warning system
• In January 2017, UGRA partnered with Kerr County in a FEMA flood warning implementation grant request for $980,000. The project was not selected for funding and most of the funds went to communities impacted by Hurricane Harvey.
• In FY18 the USGS installed a high intensity precipitation gauge at the streamflow site on the Guadalupe in Hunt included in the agreement with UGRA.
• During the previous reporting period, a pre application for a county wide flood warning system was submitted to the Texas Water Development Board Flood Infrastructure Fund. The project was invited to submit a complete application, but UGRA declined due to the low (5%) match offered through the grant.
• UGRA participated in the update to the Kerr County Hazard Mitigation Action Plan which addresses hazards including flooding. The final plan was submitted to FEMA in April 2025.
• During this reporting period, UGRA requested bids for a flood warning dashboard that combines multiple sources of data into one tool. The project will also recommend future improvements to monitoring equipment related to flood warning. Information from this dashboard will be used by UGRA staff and local emergency coordinators and decision makers. A contractor for this project was selected in April 2025.

Breathtaking.

They didn’t want to be inconvenienced by alarms going off in the middle of the night.

They didn’t want to spend the money available because it came from Democratic administrations.

They willfully chose to put children in harm’s way because it was convenient and didn’t cost them local tax dollars, in a wealthy county in Texas.

They willfully chose to kill children by outright neglect to own the libs.

They can’t blame a lack of local funding when the county has been home to so many wealthy individuals:

Another retirement destination, Kerrville turns out to have a similar concentration of the comfortably well off, ranking second in Texas for millionaires per capita, with 1,244 among its 20,749 residents, or 6 percent.

Source: San Antonio Express-News

Kerrville is the county seat and likely where all the meeting minutes above were recorded.

And there is not a lick of DEI involved here as far as I can tell. When FEMA created and published flood maps including Kerr County, they hadn’t yet been under attack by DOGE and Trump’s anti-DEI initiatives. The maps clearly showed a risk the county commissioners didn’t want to address.

Kerr County’s demographics also make it highly unlikely any brown people were involved in critical decision making – according to the 2024 census the county is 92.9% white – but I’ll leave that to journalists to vet because it’s nauseating me on the face of it without additional digging.

Imagine public officials joking on the record in a public meeting that a flood alert system is “dead in the water.”

But sure, Charlie Kirk, attack Austin’s Black fire chief in Travis County, holding him to a higher level of responsibility than the nice, wealthy, nearly all white people in Kerr County who chose not to be inconvenienced. Blame the Black man and DEI for children’s deaths in Kerr County while that fire chief’s core duties are two counties away, responsible for fire and emergency response to over 1.3 million people in Austin.

Children’s deaths caused by nice white people who refused to protect the public because it was more important not to be inconvenienced by alarms, not to pay more local taxes, and not to take Democratic administrations’ funding to own the libs.

~ ~ ~

EDIT — 5:46 PM ET —

The Tennessee Holler @[email protected]
WATCH: “More could’ve been done.”

KERR COUNTY folks didn’t want to take money from “The Biden Regime” that could’ve been used for a flood warning system 👇🏽

https://media.mstdn.social/cache/media_attachments/files/114/836/644/685/795/080/original/f6cb97ba70434ede.mp4

Jul 11, 2025, 05:08 PM

Among the flood of new developments (two sets of communications from Erez Reuveni corroborating his whistleblower complaint: one, two) and developments (DOJ’s continued obfuscation regarding the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia) detailing DOJ’s abuse of detentions, there are several details that put Todd Blanche in the thick of unlawful efforts to deport men with tattoos.

Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You

The communications Reuveni shared with the Senate Judiciary Committee that were released yesterday confirm that Reuveni has at least two witnesses with whom he discussed the “fuck you” comment Reuveni has attributed to Bove, which Bove, at his confirmation hearing, claimed he couldn’t recall but which he did not deny

For example, Reuveni produced texts between him and an unnamed colleague discussing Drew Ensign’s claimed ignorance of deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act at an emergency hearing before James Boasberg. Reuveni describes that they were “About to enter the find out phase following fuck around.”

Another set of texts reportedly shows August Flentje texting Reuveni an hour before the planes to El Salvador would land, quipping, “guess its time to find out on the “fuck you,” which Reuveni claims is proof that Flentje heard the “fuck you” comment.

Later that day, Reuveni texted his colleague saying, “Guess we are going to say fuck you to the court,” to which the colleague responds, “Well, Pamela Jo Bondi is.”

Another text exhange, from three days later, again with Flentje, shows one of them suggesting they just submit “an emoji of a middle finger as our filing” asking for a stay of his order. “a picayune middle finger.”

So Reuveni has brought the goods showing that he and his colleagues not just heard the “fuck you” comment, but continued to discuss it for several days.

Emil Bove in the thick of things

Reuveni also substantiated his claims about Emil Bove’s role in all this, notably in a substantive text exchange from the day when Todd Blanche first put Reuveni on paid leave. Days earlier, Flentje had texted Reuveni about “a nastygram from Emil Bove.”

On April 5, a few hours after Todd Blanche put Reuveni on paid leave, Flentje confirmed that at the meeting on March 15, he “told our host we would not violate a court order.”

Reuveni glossed that text this way:

The exchange demonstrates that Flentje was at the March 14 meeting during which Bove said the government might have to say “fuck you” to courts and that Flentje sees a connection between that meeting and Mr. Reuveni’s placement on administrative leave.

But the smoking gun putting aspiring Circuit Court Judge Emil Bove at the center of a decision to blow off Judge James Boasberg’s order is this email in which a top Civil Division political appointee, Yaakov Roth (the same guy who would pass on nastygrams from Bove weeks later), confirmed that he had “been told by ODAG that the principal associate deputy attorney general” — PDAAG, meaning Bove — “advised DHS last night that the deplaning of the flights that had departed US airspace prior to the court’s minute order was permissible under the law.”

Reuveni described this email in his complaint, but here he has produced it.

Emil Bove gave the order to defy Boasberg’s order.

Notably, this email is unlike all others in the communications he turned over. It appears to be a paper copy. There are definitely questions about when and how Reuveni obtained all the other communications (remember that Flentje was put on leave for a while but not fired). Of some interest, Reuveni’s texts with Flentje are in a different format — perhaps a different app — than the ones he sent to other colleagues. But this communication, in which a very senior DOJ official names Bove as the guy who ordered DHS to unload the planes, was captured in paper, not digital, form.

So Reuveni appears to have substantially corroborated his claims, even if he had to resort, in one case, to a paper copy of an email to do so.

Todd Blanche’s flopsweat

That matters not just for Emil Bove’s bid to be a Circuit Court Judge (which sadly will likely still win the support of the GOP anyway), but also for Todd Blanche’s credibility.

Todd Blanche doesn’t tweet all that much, but each time Reuveni has made his case, Blanche has taken to Xitter to squeal loudly.

The day NYT first published Reuveni’s whistleblower complaint, Blanche labeled the formal whistleblower complaint as a leak to the press violating ethical guidelines. Then he claimed that “not a single individual” except Reuveni “agrees with the statements cavalierly printed” by the NYT, which I noted at the time suggested that Blanche had already tested these cover stories.

Well, that’s interesting, because Reuveni has now presented proof that Flentje and one other colleague at least used to believe it.

Yesterday, in the wake of the release of these communications, Blanche (and Pam Bondi) took to wailing on Xitter again, accusing Reuveni — even after he produced that paper email proof that Emil Bove ordered DHS to unload the planes — of falsehoods, even while accusing Reuveni of being fired not for refusing an illegal order, but for “breaching his ethical duties.”

Blanche keeps claiming there was no order to defy, even after Reuveni presented corroboration — even in the face of efforts to avoid putting anything in writing — that everyone at DOJ knew there was.

Which is why I find two other details of interest. As noted above, Blanche tried to deny that Bove suggested they would tell courts “fuck you” by claiming he had been at the March 14 meeting where, Reuveni alleges, Bove envisioned telling courts “fuck you.”

I was at the meeting described in the article and at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed.

In his complaint, Reuveni did not include Blanche in the list of people who were at the meeting.

On Friday March 14 , 2025, Mr. Reuveni received notice ofhis promotion toActing Deputy Director ofthe Office of Immigration Litigation. That same day, following news reports that the President intended to sign a presidential proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), Mr. Reuveni was summoned to a meeting by Deputy Assistant Attorney General (DAAG) of OIL, Drew Ensign. At the meeting were Principal Assistant Deputy Attorney General (PADAG) Emil Bove, Counselor to the Deputy Attorney General James McHenry, Associate Deputy Attorney General (ADAG) Paul Perkins, DAAG Ensign, Acting Director for OIL and Mr. Reuveni’s direct supervisor, August Flentje, and other OIL attorneys.

Now, Reuveni’s original whistleblower complaint is almost entirely unredacted. The two exceptions — redacted because they might disclose materials that remain covered by a duty of confidentiality — are in a paragraph describing that March 14 meeting.

At the meeting Bove indicated to those in attendance that the AEA proclamation would soon be signed and that one or more planes containing individuals subject to the AEA would be taking off over the weekend – meaning Saturday, March 15 and Sunday, March 16. Bove did not provide further details and [half line redacted]19 Bove indicated [half line redacted]20 and stressed to all in attendance that the planes needed to take off no matter what.

Bove then made a remark concerning the possibility that a court order would enjoin those removals before they could be effectuated. Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts “fuck you” and ignore any such court order. Mr. Reuveni perceived that others in the room looked stunned, and he observed awkward, nervous glances among people in the room. Silence overtook the room. Mr. Reuveni and others were quickly ushered out of the room. Notwithstanding Bove’s directive, Mr. Reuveni left the meeting understanding that DOJ would tell DHS to follow all court orders.21

19 This clause is redacted because it is not clear that an exception to the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality applies here.

20 This clause is redacted because it is not clear that an exception to the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality applies here.

21 Mr.Reuveni left the meeting with this impression because [redacted]. This clause is redacted because it is not clear that an exception to the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality applies here. [my emphasis]

Reuveni and his attorneys view a lot of material that might qualify as attorney-client or deliberative privileged as exempted for some reason. But not these two passages and one footnote, the former of which seemingly relate to the reason why Bove said the planes had to take off. Bove insisted that the planes had to take off and said something that remains privileged, and then he said they might have to tell the courts, “fuck you.”

Perhaps any privilege covering those would fall under a different privilege?

Which is interesting because, in an interview with Devlin Barrett published yesterday, Reuveni clarified something about Blanche’s claim to have been at the meeting: According to Reuveni, Blanche came into the meeting, whispered something to Bove, then left, only after which did Bove start threatening to tell judges to fuck off.

The No. 2 official at the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, has denied Mr. Reuveni’s account, asserting he was at the same meeting and never heard Mr. Bove suggest the department disregard court orders.

“The claims about Department of Justice leadership are utterly false,” Mr. Blanche has said.

Mr. Reuveni disputed Mr. Blanche’s account. The deputy attorney general, he said, briefly entered the conference room during the March 14 meeting, but only to speak privately with Mr. Bove. Mr. Blanche then left and did not participate in the meeting, Mr. Reuveni said.

Only after the one-on-one discussion between Mr. Bove and Mr. Blanche did Mr. Bove use an expletive to suggest the Justice Department might choose to ignore court orders, Mr. Reuveni said.

Blanche’s brief entry into that meeting seems to exactly coincide with those two still-privileged redactions.

Blanche doesn’t tweet much.

What he does spend a great deal of his time doing — which is appropriate, I guess, for Trump’s lead defense attorney — is try to cover up this entire corrupt scheme. First he launched a witch hunt into the sources debunking Trump’s false claims behind the Alien Enemies Act invocation, then Pam Bondi reversed the media guidelines in an effort to assist that fight.

One of the very first public things Todd Blanche did as DAG was to launch a witch hunt into NYT’s source debunking Trump’s claims in the Alien Enemies Act. Then, when Pam Bondi reversed the media protections put into place by Merrick Garland, she cited that story as well. The seniormost officials at DOJ are using the Department to hunt down evidence of their own complicity in human rights violations. And Blanche’s intemperate response to Reuveni’s allegations looks to be more of the same.

This whole scheme — in which DOJ cooperated with Nayib Bukele so Bukele could make damning witnesses unavailable to prosecutors in the US, so DOJ could plop a bunch of mostly-innocent Venezuelans in a concentration camp as bait that Trump could attempt to use to free prisoners in Venezuela (which raises questions about those detainees in Venezuela), which Stephen Miller could use to spin false claims that migrants are terrorists — is bullshit.

All of it.

All of it is wildly corrupt on its face, but there is something about the scheme that is even more dangerous for Trump and the various men who have served as his defense attorneys.

And Trump’s defense attorney turned DAG keeps piping up to discredit himself, emphasize his flopsweat, and invite further revelations from the guy he fired in hopes all this would go away.

As a reminder, the trade war Trump launched on April 2 purports to address an emergency created by trade deficits in goods (not services).

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) (NEA), section 604 of the Trade Act of 1974, as amended (19 U.S.C. 2483), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, find that underlying conditions, including a lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships, disparate tariff rates and non-tariff barriers, and U.S. trading partners’ economic policies that suppress domestic wages and consumption, as indicated by large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States. That threat has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States in the domestic economic policies of key trading partners and structural imbalances in the global trading system. I hereby declare a national emergency with respect to this threat.

[snip]

I have declared a national emergency arising from conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, which have grown by over 40 percent in the past 5 years alone, reaching $1.2 trillion in 2024. This trade deficit reflects asymmetries in trade relationships that have contributed to the atrophy of domestic production capacity, especially that of the U.S. manufacturing and defense-industrial base. These asymmetries also impact U.S. producers’ ability to export and, consequentially, their incentive to produce.

Specifically, such asymmetry includes not only non-reciprocal differences in tariff rates among foreign trading partners, but also extensive use of non-tariff barriers by foreign trading partners, which reduce the competitiveness of U.S. exports while artificially enhancing the competitiveness of their own goods. These non-tariff barriers include technical barriers to trade; non-scientific sanitary and phytosanitary rules; inadequate intellectual property protections; suppressed domestic consumption (e.g., wage suppression); weak labor, environmental, and other regulatory standards and protections; and corruption. These non-tariff barriers give rise to significant imbalances even when the United States and a trading partner have comparable tariff rates.

That claim seems to have been forgotten in discussion of the 50% tariff Trump just threatened to place on Brazil.

Trump barely focused on his claimed emergency in his letter — posted to Truth Social — to Lula da Silva. Rather, he mentioned:

• The purported Witch Hunt against Jair Bolsonaro — the prosecution for Bolsonaro’s attempted coup — “that should end IMMEDIATELY!”
• Efforts to regulate social media in Brazil (largely with the goal of investigating and cracking down on insurrection), which Trump called “hundreds of SECRET and UNLAWFUL Censorship Orders to U.S. Social Media platforms, threatening them with Millions of Dollars in Fines and Eviction from the Brazilian Social Media market”

All that was in addition to (and before) the boilerplate language on goods included in the letter.

Mind you, that boilerplate would be nonsense in any case, because the US enjoys a trade surplus with Brazil. There could be no trade deficit emergency with Brazil because the US doesn’t have one.

Which is one of the points Lula noted in response (ironically, on Xitter). The US says the US has a trade surplus with Brazil.

In light of the public statement made by U.S. President Donald Trump on social media on the afternoon of Wednesday (9), it is important to highlight the following:

[snip]

The claim regarding a U.S. trade deficit in its commercial relationship with Brazil is inaccurate. Statistics from the U.S. government itself show a surplus of $410 billion in the trade of goods and services with Brazil over the past 15 years.

Therefore, any unilateral tariff increases will be addressed in accordance with Brazil’s Economic Reciprocity Law.

Sovereignty, respect and the unwavering defense of the interests of the Brazilian people are the values that guide our relationship with the world.

Which leaves solely the complaints pertaining to coup accountability: that Brazil fined Xitter when it refused to comply with legal and investigative demands, as well as the requirement that it have a local representative (through whom Brazil would enforce the law), as well as the complaint that Brazil is holding Bolsonaro accountable for the same crime that Trump himself committed.

Here’s how Lula addressed those complaints.

Brazil is a sovereign nation with independent institutions and will not accept any form of tutelage.

The judicial proceedings against those responsible for planning the coup d’état fall exclusively under the jurisdiction of Brazil´s Judicial Branch and, as such, are not subject to any interference or threats that could compromise the independence of national institutions.

In the context of digital platforms, Brazilian society rejects hateful content, racism, child pornography, scams, fraud, and speeches against human rights and democratic freedom.

In Brazil, freedom of expression must not be confused with aggression or violent practices. All companies—whether domestic or foreign—must comply with Brazilian law in order to operate within our territory.

This is not a trade emergency.

It’s a democracy emergency.

A sovereignty emergency.

A coup accountability emergency.

And even if those were emergencies to the US, Trump has not declared a separate, “OMIGOD an ally might hold someone accountable for the same crime I committed,” emergency to cover the real scope of this letter.

Trump’s trade war has already been declared unlawful. Trump’s attempt to use trade policies to help a fellow coup conspirator comes in the wake of a May 28 Court of International Trade judgement that Trump usurped the power of Congress in imposing these tariffs — the tariffs focused on trade deficits and fentanyl trafficking, as opposed to coup accountability.

Plaintiffs and some Amici argue that the Government’s interpretation transforms IEEPA into an impermissible delegation of power because “[t]he President’s assertion of authority here has no meaningful limiting standards, essentially enabling him to impose any tariff rate he wants on any country at any time, for virtually any reason.” Pls.’ V.O.S. Mots. at 25; see also Pls.’ Oregon Mots. at 19; Pls.’ V.O.S. Reply at 22. Similarly, Plaintiffs suggest that Congress’s use of the words “regulate . . . importation” does not indicate the clear mandate necessary to delegate “such unbounded authority to the President to make such decisions of ‘vast economic and political significance,’” as the wide-scale imposition of tariffs. Pls.’ Oregon Mot. at 18; see also Pls.’ V.O.S. Reply at 17; Inst. for Pol. Integrity’s Amicus Br. at 16–18. The Government counters that IEEPA contains sufficient limitations: the President must declare a national emergency, the emergency expires after one year unless renewed, the emergency must be declared with respect to an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” and the powers must extend only to property in which a foreign country or foreign national has an interest. Gov’t Resp. to V.O.S. Mots. at 28–29.

The separation of powers is always relevant to delegations of power between the branches. Both the nondelegation and the major questions doctrines, even if not directly applied to strike down a statute as unconstitutional, provide useful tools for the court to interpret statutes so as to avoid constitutional problems. These tools indicate that an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would constitute an improper abdication of legislative power to another branch of government. Regardless of whether the court views the President’s actions through the nondelegation doctrine, through the major questions doctrine, or simply with separation of powers in mind, any interpretation of IEEPA that delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional. [my emphasis]

The CIT distinguished past tariffs from these Trump tariffs — again, tariffs that were tied exclusively to a trade deficit, not a coup accountability emergency — because they didn’t entail imposing “whatever tariff rates he deems desirable.”

While the court in Yoshida II ultimately reversed the lower court’s decision and upheld President Nixon’s tariffs, it upheld the tariffs on the basis that they were limited, “which is quite different from imposing whatever tariff rates he deems desirable.”

[snip]

Like the court in Yoshida II, this court does not read the words “regulate . . . importation” in IEEPA as authorizing the President to impose whatever tariff rates he deems desirable. Indeed, such a reading would create an unconstitutional delegation of power. See id. Importantly, President Trump’s tariffs do not include the limitations that the court in Yoshida II relied upon in upholding President Nixon’s actions under TWEA. Where President Nixon’s tariffs were expressly limited by the rates established in the HTSUS, see Proclamation No. 4074, 85 Stat. at 927, the tariffs here contain no such limit. Absent these limitations, this is exactly the scenario that the lower court warned of in Yoshida I—and that the appellate court acknowledged in Yoshida II.

In sum, just as the court recognized in Yoshida II, the words “regulate . . . importation” cannot grant the President unlimited tariff authority. [my emphasis]

And, in language addressing Trump’s drug trafficking sanctions, CIT also said the President could not use tariffs to pressure a country to do what he wants (in that case, to do more on fentanyl trafficking).

The Government’s reading would cause the meaning of “deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat” to permit any infliction of a burden on a counterparty to exact concessions, regardless of the relationship between the burden inflicted and the concessions exacted. If “deal with” can mean “impose a burden until someone else deals with,” then everything is permitted. It means a President may use IEEPA to take whatever actions he chooses simply by declaring them “pressure” or “leverage” tactics that will elicit a third party’s response to an unconnected “threat.” Surely this is not what Congress meant when it clarified that IEEPA powers “may not be exercised for any other purpose” than to “deal with” a threat. [my emphasis]

The Court of International Trade has already said doing this is ultra vires, well beyond Trump’s legal authority, precisely because Trump claims to have unlimited unreviewable authority to usurp Congress’ tariff authority. And it said so precisely because the claimed authority Trump was invoking was so unlimited, extending even to coercion regarding things entirely unrelated to trade.

And it’s not just the court that said it. The captioned challenge here, from a wine importer and other small businesses, is being lawyered by CATO associates. Another challenge is being lawyered by recipients of Koch funding. Among the amicus briefs submitted to the CIT was one signed by a weirdly bipartisan group of muckety-mucks, including right wingnuts like Steven Calabresi. And in recent days, before the Federal Court of Appeals (which will hold a hearing on Trump’s appeal on July 31), the Chamber of Commerce and a bunch of economists fronted by the American Enterprise Institute weighed in. The latter debunks both Trump’s assertion of emergency and his claim that tariffs will fix the purported emergency.

First, IEEPA requires the President to declare a national emergency based on an “unusual and extraordinary threat . . . to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.” 50 U.S.C. § 1701(a). Trade deficits, however, have existed consistently over the past fifty years in the United States, for extended periods in the United States in the nineteenth century, and in most countries in most years in recent decades. They are thus not “unusual and extraordinary.” See Part I, infra. Second, the existence of these ordinary and recurring trade deficits is not in and of itself a “threat . . . to the national security, foreign policy or the economy” of the United States. See Part II, infra. Third, even if the current trade deficit constituted an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security or the economy as required by IEEPA, the tariffs imposed under IEEPA by the President do not meaningfully reduce trade deficits and hence do not “deal with” the deficits as IEEPA requires. See Part III, infra.

With his coup accountability emergency, Trump has taken his unlawful tariffs — already opposed by a wide swath of right wing intellects, who are represented by lawyers who’ll get a fair hearing at SCOTUS — and made them far more abusive.

And he has done so with a trade partner for whom threats tied to China may backfire. After all, China has long substituted agricultural imports from Brazil, notably in soybeans, to replace US imports when Trump stages a tariff tantrum.

Trump has staged his coup accountability emergency with a trade partner that provides a notable proportion of America’s coffee imports. 50% tariffs on Brazilian coffee will undoubtedly provide a jolt to the system, but probably not the kind that will help Trump.

Donald Trump has threatened to impose a 50% tax on coffee in the United States for little other reason than Brazil won’t let his buddy overturn democratic elections with impunity.

That’s outrageous. It is quite clearly an instance of Trump threatening “whatever tariff rates he deems desirable” with the goal of “inflict[ing ]a burden on a counterparty to exact concessions, regardless of the relationship between the burden inflicted and the concessions exacted,” both precisely the measure the CIT used to declare Trump’s trade deficits unlawful.

But it clarifies the legal stakes on the one legal challenge on which right wingers have joined Democrats in droves to oppose Trump’s abuses, because in this case the President is attempting to use tariffs completely divorced from a trade deficit to elicit concessions totally unrelated to the national good.

It was already the case that this is the legal challenge that plaintiffs had the best chance of winning — because SCOTUS treats economic stability differently, because right wing lawyers will argue it, because this is a clear separation of powers violation. Then Trump went and made the arbitrary, personalist nature of it far more explicit.

Update, 7/12: Ilya Somin, the lead lawyer on the existing challenge to Trump’s tariffs, makes this point here.

If the president can use IEEPA to impose tariffs for completely ridiculous reasons like these, he can use it to impose them against any nation for any reason. That reinforces our argument that the administration’s interpretation of IEEPA leads to a boundless and unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive. A unanimous ruling in our favor by the US Court of International Trade concluded that IEEPA “does not authorize the President to impose unbounded tariffs” and that such “an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would constitute an improper abdication of legislative power to another branch of government.”

On podcasts and in this post, I’ve been trying to make a point about how you resist fascism.

Americans have at least three tools to resist fascism: legal, legislative, and via political movement. A great many people have conflated legislative opposition with movement opposition, and based on that conflation, assumed that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries must be leaders of The Opposition.

But that’s a category error.

While there are a lot of things Schumer, especially, could do better, you shouldn’t want either Schumer or Jeffries to be the leader of the resistance. You shouldn’t want that because the goals of the movement and of an opposition party in Congress are not the same. You shouldn’t want that because having a Black guy and a Jew from New York leading your resistance will likely make it harder to do what you need to do, which is (in significant part) to build a political movement big enough to undermine if not overthrow fascism.

I’m sure I’ll need to tweak this illustration and table,  but here’s how I think about it: Democrats in Congress are part of the political movement, but that is different than their legislative role.

Start from the end goal: according to a contested theory from Erica Chenoweth, if a popular nonviolent movement comes to incorporate 3.5% of the population, you can achieve political change. G. Elliott Morris estimates that around 4 to 6 million people participated in the No Kings protests, so about 1.4 to 1.8% of the population (but that’s a one-time protest and you need to sustain such numbers). If you buy this theory, you need to at least double the popular opposition to Trump willing to take to the streets.

While it’s possible you could get rid of Trump via other means (maybe right wingers get sick of him and support impeachment in two years; maybe a Democrat beats him or his chosen successor in 2028; maybe he dies a natural death and JD Vance takes over, with less charisma to get things done), doing so would not be enough to reverse a number of institutional things, starting with the right wing majority on SCOTUS, that serve to protect the trappings of Christian nationalism anyway.

To do a lot of things people rightly believe are necessary — such as holding the ICE goons accountable — you’d need to do far more than just win an election, because unless something more happens, the goons will be protected by qualified immunity.

Now go back to how opposition to Trump’s fascism has grown.

The first things that happened were lawsuits, a flood of them (which continue unabated). While Democratic-led states have brought a number of important lawsuits, members of Congress have little standing to do so. Unions have brought many key lawsuits, as have Democratic groups, as have other members of civil society, including the law firms and universities targeted. I keep noting that some of the key lawsuits challenging tariffs have come from Koch or CATO-aligned non-profits (and the Chamber just filed an amicus), a fact that may get them a more favorable hearing at SCOTUS.

The courts help to buy time. They can provide transparency otherwise unavailable. They force the Trump administration to go on the record, resulting in damaging contradictions. Trump has, thus far, selected his targets very poorly, and so his persecution has and will created some leaders or political martyrs.

But the courts will not save us.

The courts won’t save us because, after some initial pushback on Stephen Miller’s deportation gulag, SCOTUS seems to have fallen into line, repeatedly intervening to allow Trump to proceed with his damaging policies even as challenges continue. The courts won’t save us because we fully expect SCOTUS to bless a lot of what Trump is doing, including firing everyone short of Jerome Powell.

Protests and loud opposition at town halls have been growing since the beginning. But these protests weren’t affiliated with the Democratic Party. That’s useful for several reasons. You’re going to find it a lot quicker and easier to target a well-funded corporate entity like Tesla without such affiliation. And protests will be more likely to attract defectors — former Republican voters or apolitical independents — in the numbers that would be necessary if they’re not branded as Democratic entities.

Plus, movement activities include far more than protests, and there are a number of things being done by people who want no tie to the Democratic Party. Some of the smarter pushback to ICE in Los Angeles, for example, comes from Antifa activists who are far to the left of the Democratic Party and have been doing this work even under Democratic Administrations. Some of the witnessing of abuse of immigrants comes from the Catholic Church, and I would hope other faiths might join in. Some of the political activism is focused on particular interest groups, like Veterans or scientists, which don’t and should not derive their energy from the party.

The political movement is and should remain a big tent because it affords more flexibility and provides more entrance points for people.

And so, even if Jeffries or Schumer were better at messaging, you wouldn’t want them to lead it.

Which brings us to what we should expect from them. A lot of the hostility to both of them derives from the Continuing Resolution in March, in which Jeffries kept all but one (Jared Golden) of his members unified in opposition, but then Schumer flipflopped on whether to oppose cloture. In my experience, the vast majority of people who know they’re supposed to be angry at Schumer for that don’t know what the vote was, don’t know the terms of government shutdown (for example, that Trump would get to decide who was expendable), and can’t distinguish between the cloture vote and the final passage (in which just Angus King and Jeanne Shaheen voted to pass the bill). They sure as hell have not considered whether keeping the government open resulted in things — like the emergency filings that prevented wholesale use of Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans to CECOT — that really were a net good, to say nothing of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s challenge to his deportation.

The point being, much of the frustration with Jeffries and Schumer comes without a sophisticated understanding of their day job. For example, many people were complaining that Schumer was messaging about the Big Ugly bill when they wanted him to be messaging about immigration, and then, once they understood the import, started complaining that there hasn’t been enough coverage of the healthcare cuts in the Big Ugly (in my opinion both he and lefty journalists should have been focusing on the dragnet funded by it, as both David Dayen and I did, and as other journalists are only belatedly doing). But they often ignored the efforts made to thwart the bill with Byrd Rule exclusions, which in some cases excluded really toxic things from the bill (like restrictions on judicial contempt).

Jeffries and Schumer will continue to disappoint people wanting them to lead the resistance, because to do their day job — to try to win majorities in 2026 so they can do more to hold Trump accountable and, in the interim, to try — however fruitlessly — to coax their Republican colleagues to stop rubber stamping Trump’s authoritarianism, they have to do things like recruit challengers and help them raise money. There’s a lot one can explain — such as why, in the wake of the crypto industry flooding the Sherrod Brown race with funding, too many Democrats would support a bill the crypto industry wants — without endorsing.

But there’s a great deal that Jeffries or Schumer do that doesn’t get seen; each week of the last five, for example, one of the people whining about one or both Minority Leaders non-stop has falsely claimed they hadn’t done or said something they actually had; they were, in fact, whining because what Jeffries and Schumer did wasn’t easy for them to see without their having to work for it. An expert on parliamentary procedure just showed that Dems have made their colleagues work far more hours than in recent memory; Democrats have been using tools to stall, often with no notice, much less anyone mining their public comments for good attack footage.

More importantly, though, there’s a great deal that other legislators are doing that serves both political and legislative opposition. Hearings with Trump’s cabinet members, for example, are astounding, both in terms of content and conflict. While lefties don’t understand the potential use of Congressional letters like right wingers do, some of the ones Democrats have sent lay necessary foundation for ongoing pressure on the Administration, whether on immigration or Epstein or DOD waste. I’ve seen multiple people assume that members of Congress only attempt to do oversight of ICE detention if they get arrested, but far more members have tried; I would like Democrats to have already sued regarding DHS’ serial efforts to change the law on how they do that oversight, but I hope that will happen soon.

There’s a great deal of content for adversarial messaging. The failure — and this is only partly a failure of Congress itself — is in doing that messaging, in using what is out there. If a Minority Leader said something powerful but pundits were too lazy to watch CSPAN, did it really happen?

Therein lies the rub — and the area where the complaints at least identify the correct problem (while often lacking the mirror necessary to identify the cure).

There is broad and growing opposition to Trump’s actions. For privileged white people, at least, most still have courage to step up in both easy and more challenging ways. All around the country Americans are standing up for their migrant neighbors.

Leaders are stepping up to do the most powerful work, the political movement. And Leaders in Congress, as well as rank-and-file members, are doing a lot that’s getting ignored.

What is missing, in my opinion, is the kind of online messaging to make stuff resonate, yoked with an understanding of what Congress can and should do and what activists are better suited to do.

We — and I include myself in that we — are part of the problem.

What is missing is, to a large extent, the same thing that was missing last year, during the election, and was missing before that where Joe Biden’s son was destroyed with no pushback. What is missing is a feedback mechanism that can mobilize shame and accountability, so all the outrage can have some effect, both political and electoral.

There was a remarkable moment in Trump’s cabinet meeting. A journalist asked, first, if it was true that Jeffrey Epstein had worked for a foreign intelligence service. Then he asked why there was a minute missing in the video released to show no one entered in cell.

Trump blew up.

Trump: Are you still talking about Jeffrey EPstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking — we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things that, people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is UNbelieveable. You want to waste the time [points to Bondi] you feel like answering?

Bondi: I don’t mind answering.

Trump: I mean, I can’t believe you’re asking a question about Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success, and also tragedy, with what happened in Texas. It just seems like … a desecration.

I can think of no moment in his ten year political career where Trump so obviously lost his cool because he was helpless to direct attention where he wanted it.

And it’s likely to only keep Epstein at the center of attention.

Update: Mike Cernovich has already posted that, “We will continue asking about Epstein.” Elon asks, “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”

Update: Liz Wheeler (no relation–but one of the propagandists originally promised Epstein files) wrote a long screed about how Trump is misreading his base. This is just part of it!

President Trump snaps at reporter who asks him Epstein question.

Trump is massively misreading his base on this one.

It could cost him the midterms.

People CARE about Epstein. Not only because of the grisly crimes against children, but because there’s evidence of a government cover up.

Evidence like Epstein’s autopsy showing injuries incongruent with suicide. Evidence like the British Palace’s response to ABC’s nuked report on Epstein & Prince Andrew & Bill Clinton. Evidence like former U.S. Atty Alex Acosta saying he was told to back off because Epstein was an intel asset & then finding his DOJ emails mysteriously disappeared, etc.

And now government officials are telling us to ignore the evidence in front of our eyes & believe them—without evidence. Nope. Not gonna do it. We voted for radical transparency & JUSTICE.

President Trump should not underestimate how much goodwill he’s lost among his base due to Pam Bondi’s mishandling of the Epstein files. People are furious. I would know, I was the collateral damage in Bondi’s infernal Epstein binder debacle. She should’ve been fired on the spot.

[snip]

Epstein is foundational. That’s why Trump’s base has a visceral reaction to being told we’ll get the Epstein files… and now being told actually we’re getting nothing.

Pam Bondi didn’t tell us the truth. She seems more interested in being a Fox News star than keeping promises. Something is fishy about the Epstein stuff. His racket. His death. His friends. His intel connections. Patting us on the head & telling us “nothing to see here” is infuriating.

President Trump should not underestimate the significance of this moment. He’s losing goodwill by the day—thanks to Pam Bondi. Trump is smart. He cares about his base. He listens.

He should listen now, so it doesn’t cost him the midterms.

Even before Trump was inaugurated, I had great fun boosting expectations that Trump would release the Jeffrey Epstein files.

I didn’t do so because I believed there would be a massive Epstein release (partly because some of the conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein are not true and partly because what is true is that Trump is among the powerful men who are implicated). I didn’t do so because I believed any files would ever come out.

I did so because beliefs about Epstein are non-falsifiable. I did so because even if there were no damning materials tying Trump to Epstein, the President would still never be able to satisfy the expectations of his mob.

I did so because the promise (from Kash Patel, long before he was confirmed, and then from Pam Bondi) and expectation that Trump would release the files was an expectation that Trump’s supporters should expect to have fulfilled — after all he ordered DOJ to do just that, with the JFK, RFK, and MLK files.

But there’s no chance their expectations can ever been fulfilled. It was a way, I knew, where Trump was going to disappoint some of his most rabid fans.

Trump promised to release the secret files the continued secrecy of which have fueled decades of conspiracy theories, so why wouldn’t he release files about pedophilia, the legitimate concern that has fueled the Trump-supporting QAnoners?

I fueled such expectations on Xitter because if the demand to see the Epstein files ever took hold, Bondi would be stuck.

Then Bondi made things worse when she told Fox News that Epstein’s client file was on her desk for review. She made things worse when she orchestrated the re-release of the already-released files to a select group of right wing propagandists, all packaged up to look special, a spectacle that stoked divisions among MAGAts but also raised concerns that she was covering stuff up. She made things still worse when — responding to James Comer’s role in making things worse, when he claimed the Epstein files had been disappeared — she said there were tens of thousands of videos involving Epstein.

Kash Patel, who promised to release the files, and Dan Bongino, who begged his readers never to let go of this scandal? They fed the fever too with their years of spreading conspiracy theories about the Epstein files. And when FBI’s conspiracy theorists in chief tried to reverse course a month ago, it only further fueled suspicions.

Then Elon joined the fun, accusing Trump of being in the Epstein files as part of his tantrum against Trump (but then deleting that file). As someone who was also close to Ghislaine Maxwell, Elon might know!

Dan Goldman joined in, expressing, “grave concern about what appears to be a concerted effort by you to delay and even prevent the release of the Jeffrey Epstein Files,” and asking whether Trump’s identity was being redacted from any of the files. Robert Garcia and Stephen Lynch joined in, writing Pam Bondi a letter, asking Bondi to formally answer whether the Epstein files are being withheld — as Elon Musk alleged — because Trump is in them, and further asking (among other questions) whether Trump had a role in the delay of their release.

Bondi’s stonewalling, after both she and Kash promised everything would come quickly, was becoming the story.

So yesterday, DOJ and FBI released (or rather, made available to Axios without yet, apparently, releasing it via normal channels) a two-page unsigned notice (which may be on letterhead created for the purpose).

It included two main, credible conclusions:

• Much of the material that FBI has depicts victims and any release of that material would retraumatize the victims.
• FBI concluded (and Trump’s flunkies agree) that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. DOJ released two files (one unaltered, one enhanced, both with titles that do not even mention Epstein) showing that no one entered his cell the night he killed himself.

But there’s also a short, broader conclusion that is less sound.

This systematic review revealed no incriminating “client list.” There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties. [my emphasis]

Emphasis on credible?

Of course there’s a client list; one version of it was already released. There are also the names or descriptions shared by victims of the men who abused them. And while there may be no evidence in the FBI files that Epstein did blackmail Trump or anyone else, he had blackmail material on them. There’s certainly credible reason to believe that information is one of the reasons he was allowed to persist so long; it was useful for other powerful people, possibly even spooks in one or another country. That FBI didn’t uncover evidence confirming that others were involved in trafficking young people is dramatically different from saying that there’s no damning information implicating Epstein’s Johns.

But let’s assume for the moment that these conclusions are impeccable (and as I said, the decision not to release videos showing victims and the conclusion about the suicide are sound), that means that the people who’ve been claiming to have inside knowledge who promised to release the files — starting with FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Direct Dan Bongino — are braying conspiracy theorists who cannot be trusted in any position of authority.

If it’s true that all this was a conspiracy theory, Kash and Bongino must leave the FBI, because they’ve just confessed they will endorse any kind of conspiracy theory to spin up Trump’s rubes. Pam Bondi must call for their resignations immediately, and while she’s at it, she should leave herself, because her original stunt release created the very expectations that she’s now trying to squelch.

They all promised to fulfill conspiracy theories and are now claiming they were lying about their certainty there was some there there.

Honestly, they’d be doing themselves a favor by doing so. But that won’t happen, and because these conspiracy theories are non-falsifiable, this attempt to make the entire promised reveal go away will simply fuel further conspiracy theories. Indeed, it already is.

Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Pam Bondi have now confirmed they are raging conspiracy theorists. And yet even that will not be enough to tamp down further conspiracy theories.

Update: I’m laughing my ass off. Doocy quoted Pam Bondi’s claim from an old interview, stating she had the client list on her desk. Karoline Leavitt spun it, with Doocy making big faces.

In addition, Unusual Whale notes that the last minute of the day (these may be PT time), from 11:58:59 to 11:59:59, missing from the video. Oh, and it turns out it’s not even the right cell.

Like many insecure white men, Donald J. Trump is a master at dodging all personal accountability for his own actions. There are the serial bankruptcies, sure. He has blamed “his predecessors” for things that happened between 2017 and 2021 (indeed, Scott Bessent just blamed Democrats for blowing out the deficit in 2020). But the real measure of his mastery at dodging accountability is how, through a combination of denial and distraction, Trump never paid a price for the excess deaths and delayed recovery from Hurricane Maria in 2018.

A similar catastrophe in Hurricane Katrina response probably did more to sink George W. Bush’s legacy than the Iraq War.

But Trump managed to simply deprive Puerto Rico of disaster support and still flip heavily Puerto Rican districts in last year’s election.

Understanding and preempting Trump’s attempts to dodge accountability for his failed policies may be crucial to reversing his authoritarian power grab. After all, already his policies have killed thousands overseas and endangered business, big and small. But the scale of catastrophe he will exacerbate or even cause, whether in economic crash or pandemic or terrorism or cybersecurity failures or things less obvious, could do grave lasting damage to the US. We can say that with great confidence now, but that only matters if we can hold him accountable for all the foreseeable catastrophes his policies will cause.

If he is held accountable, we might generate broad opposition to him, even among some MAGAts; if he scapegoats others, catastrophe will only provide a way to consolidate power.

Which is why the panicked response to the Texas flood that devastated a girl’s summer camp matters.

It’s not yet clear how the vacancies Trump demanded exacerbated flood response, but key positions, including those that might have warned of the flood, are vacant.

The National Weather Service’s San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday’s flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents Weather Service workers.

The Weather Service’s nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Mr. Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.

That office’s warning coordination meteorologist left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure.

Some of the openings may predate the current Trump administration. But at both offices, the vacancy rate is roughly double what it was when Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January, according to Mr. Fahy.

John Sokich, who until January was director of congressional affairs for the National Weather Service, said those unfilled positions made it harder to coordinate with local officials because each Weather Service office works as a team. “Reduced staffing puts that in jeopardy,” he said.

Both Speaker Mike and — more controversially — the White House have suggested prayer is the only available recourse. “May God wrap his loving arms around all those in Texas,” because Trump stripped Texas of emergency response services before a climate disaster rolled through.

Scott Bessent (fresh off blaming Democrats for blowing up the deficit while Trump was in charge) lashed out at Larry Summers for tying the Big Ugly bill to response failures in Texas, declaring that holding a white man like himself accountable is “toxic” and “cruel.”

He has turned a human tragedy into a political cudgel. Such remarks are feckless and deeply offensive.

Professor Summers should immediately issue a public apology for his toxic language.

I hope the nonprofit and for-profit institutions with which he is affiliated will join me in this call.

If he is unwilling or unable to acknowledge the cruelty of his remarks, they should consider Harvard’s example and make his unacceptable rhetoric grounds for dismissal.

Trump himself, when asked whether his assault on FEMA had a role in delayed warnings in Texas, both claimed that this was unforeseeable but also deferred discussion of FEMA because “they’re busy working” (and, of course, Trump instantly made an emergency declaration whereas he has delayed for even larger tragedies in states that oppose him).

I got a bit of criticism on social media for suggesting we need a tag for Trump disasters — Trump Murder Flood, Trump Murder Hack, Trump Murder Disease — so as to make it harder for him to dodge accountability (and to demonstrate their commonality in policy failures). Plus, there’s the larger question of accountability for refusing to combat or prepare for climate change, the real culprit in Texas.

But amid tepid insider analysis about whether Democrats can hang the Big Ugly bill on right wingers in the mid-terms, if we make it that far, the accountability for the impacts of Trump’s policy failures is a far more important issue.

Trump’s policies have and will get people killed. Will we find a way to hold him accountable.

This time?