Tulsi Gabbard has a so-called whistleblower (SCWB) on whose claims she has built wild conspiracy theories that conflict even with what Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe have said after reviewing the same documents. The SCWB’s claims about … well, a bunch of things, are so flimsy I thought I could just ignore them.

Sadly, I can’t.

Tulsi just used the claims to fire a top NSA mathematician, Vinh Nguyen, over the objections of the Acting Director of NSA.

The acting director of the National Security Agency tried to protect one of his top scientists from losing his security clearance as Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, prepared to announce the move this week, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The effort failed. Ms. Gabbard, on orders from President Trump, fired the scientist, who was a leading government expert on artificial intelligence, cryptology and advanced mathematics.

SCWB also seems to harbor a grievance against Shelby Pierson based on his own conspiratorial misunderstanding. Pierson warned against Russian interference in 2020, and had since moved back to lead the analytical team at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. She was ousted along with Nguyen.

So this whistleblower complaint appears to have led to the ouster of two senior intelligence officials.

And his claims are riddled with problems.

As laid out in documents Tulsi has released, there are several parts to his complaint (but they’re so disorganized they make me worry about the analytical ability of what must be one of the Intelligence Community’s top analysts). What appears to have happened is the SCWB felt that Nguyen pressured him to adopt one of the Key Judgments of the 2017 ICA weeks after the fact, and it led him to get paranoid about everything that happened before and after that. Based off a misreading, a rumor, and an apparent chip on his shoulder, in 2019 he came to believe that both Nguyen and Pierson had been hiding that the Steele dossier had a role in the ICA that it provably did not have, and based on that, he tried to submit a whistleblower complaint, with little success, until Tulsi came along.

Here’s the timeline:

February 2016: Squire Patton Boggs shares concerns about voting

Years after the fact, SCWB retroactively came to suspect that a law firm reaching out to raise concerns about election integrity must have been a malicious attempt to influence the election.

Late 2016: Stand down on election infrastructure intrusions

Leading up to the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, SCWB was tasked, with one other person, with doing an overview of Russian intrusions into voting infrastructure. The more they looked, the more they found, but with one exception, there was no exfiltration involved. Before that was finalized for the ICA, someone — this may be Nyugen again — told him to stop working on one particular intrusion because it was something else.

SCWB claims that his work didn’t make it into the ICA, but there are nine paragraphs on the subject, including this one, which appears to list the “something else” as criminal hackers.

Unidentified actors operating from leased commercial infrastructure commonly used in GRU operations also targeted US state and local voter registration systems. We have low confidence in attributing these reports to the GRU because such services are commonly used by cybercriminals, who probably conducted at least some of the intrusion attempts to collect personally identifiable information on US victims.

Years later, SCWB would come to believe this something else was not criminal hackers, but a continuation of the DNS fabrications John Durham invented as part of his pursuit of a Russian conspiracy theory. SCWB based this in part on a deliberately inflammatory and factually erroneous court filing which had to be walked back, but not before Kash Patel and Trump weighed in to invite death threats.

Tellingly, Tulsi didn’t provide the backup to this SCWB claim, which suggests it could withstand even less scrutiny than the rest of his claims.

January 4, 2017: Treatment of foreign media

SCWB also complained about how the ICA dealt with foreign media, reasoning that there were other foreign media outlets seeking to intervene in the election, so it would be unsound analytically to present only the Russian attempts to denigrate Hillary. According to an endnote, he raised this issue on January 4, 2017, the day before the ICA was finalized.

Early to mid-January 2017: The Key Judgment dispute (SCWB complaint version)

The first complaint presented in his complaint (which appears in two places, and is actually the third or fourth complaint chronologically) is that he was pressured to adopt the ICA judgment that the Russians wanted to influence the election, period, but especially to support Trump.

In the second description of this, SCWB places this temporally before the ICA was finalized and contextualizes the dispute against the backdrop of changing views between September and January (precisely the view Tulsi adopted in her propaganda work). That second description includes a number of assertions that don’t match the documents Tulsi released.

Through my role in leading production of the prior 2016 ICA, I also knew that as recently as September of 2016, other elements of the ICvi had pushed back during analytic coordination on warnings of Russian intent to influence the 2016 presidential election, stating that such a judgement would be misleading. Yet, by January, at least one of the IC Elements that had pushed back (the Federal Bureau of Investigation) had seemingly altered its position and embraced a judgement of Russian intent to influence the election, seemingly without any new data other than the election’s unexpected result and public speculation that Russia had ”hacked” the vote – a scenario that, we in the IC judged, simply did not occur.

His endnote, vi above, cites to this email, which is entirely limited to voting infrastructure intrusions.

On page 5, under the “(U// ) Adversaries with Intent” section, we would prefer for the first sentence regarding Russia’s intent to be softened. The way it currently reads, it would indicate that we have definitive information that Russia does intend to disrupt our elections and we are uncomfortable making that assessment at this point. We would suggest editing the sentence to read as the following (changes highlighted): “( ) We judge Russia to be the only nation state with the current means and possible motivation to use cyber attack to disrupt the 2016 election or deny political legitimacy to US presidential candidates.” We would also suggest editing the title of that section to instead read something along the lines of “(U// ) Evaluation of Likely Adversaries” so that it doesn’t mislead the reader to believe that the IC currently has information indicating Russia has a known intent to influence the elections.

So SCWB is the source of Tulsi’s own conflation of warnings about Russian intent to change the vote with Russian intent to influence who won, and as such his claims about changed views are simply not backed by the record. They’re more defensible in his case, both because he came to this problem from the focus of voting infrastructure and was compartmented out of discussions about Russian intent. But it’s still provably a conflation of two different things.

Furthermore, CIA fully backed the view that Russian intended to help Trump, but even if SCWB were right that only FBI had changed their view, that could reflect several prongs of the criminal investigation about which no one else knew — that George Papadopoulos had gotten seeming advance warning of Russia’s effort to harm Hillary and Carter Page claimed he had an “open checkbook” to found a pro-Russian think tank.

At that level, then, his primary complaint replicates (or, more likely, is the source) of all the problems with Tulsi’s larger conspiracy theories, that he claims not to know the difference between a voting machine and a DNC server.

In the first telling of this conflict, however, SCWB made specific claims about what he remembered his NIO — understood to be Nguyen — saying, six years later:

There is reporting you are not allowed to see, if you saw it, you would agree.

Isn’t it possible Putin has something on Trump, to blackmail and coerce him?

You need to TRUST ME on this.

I need you to say you agree with these judgments, so that DIA will go along with them! [emphasis original]

This is the claimed source of pressure and now the likely explanation for the firing of one of NSA’s top mathematicians.

Importantly, this exchange necessarily came after the finalization of the ICA, because (in SCWB’s telling) it was influenced by James Clapper’s purported reaction to the briefing of the Steele dossier to Trump.

According to [], the DNI had been surprised by DIR Comey’s unilateral, last moment inclusion of the “Steel Dossier” in briefing materials — supposedly inserted by DIR Comey as the group rode together in a government vehicle. [] had characterized the “Steel Dossier” as being viewed by the DNI, and [] as well, as non-credible sensationalism, and to my knowledge the material had never been taken seriously by the IC.

But the rumor about Clapper turned out to be wrong.

While SCWB may have had not access to this for some time, Clapper testified to HPSCI in July 2017 that the plan ahead of time was to have Comey brief Trump on it.

MR. CLAPPER: No, the only purpose was to make sune that the President-elect was aware it was out there. And when we went up to brief him and his team on the 6th of January, we had deliberately planned ahead of time that we’d bring this up, but neck down just to him and to Director Comey.

In other words, SCWB’s entire understanding was based on a false rumor of what went on — not to mention a seeming sustained and unpersuasive ignorance of what was publicly reported on the dossier.

Again, I have no complaint that SCWB didn’t budge his judgment based on the fact that he was not read into the Fusion Cell compartment, which is what really was going on. But really, the dispute is overblown, because by this point (again, several weeks after the publication of the ICA) the ICA was already stale. I know I didn’t care whether DIA bought off on it weeks after the fact.

Importantly, however, Tulsi’s entire conspiracy theory is based on SCWB’s uncorrected adoption of a rumor here.

September 2019: The dossier tantrum (SCWB complaint version)

SCWB’s mistaken belief that the dossier was somehow the secret thing that was central to the ICA that he didn’t know about likely explains the way he threw a tantrum about it in September 2019, based off a wild misreading of an email to him.

At a time when the precise role of the dossier had been public for over a year, he was forwarded a FOIA request referencing “Shelby” — which he seems to have taken as a reference to Shelby Pierson — to search for references to the dossier because “an assessment” of the dossier “was added as an annex.”

Shelby believes this should be responded to by the NIC as the dossier was a factor in the 2017 ICA on the election interference in which an assessment of the document was added as an annex.

Please review the attach document and conduct a search for the time period May 2016through February 2017 of all records of communication (including emails on both .gov and non-.gov accounts, text messages, and instant chats) between the office of the Director ofNational Intelligence, including but not limited to former ODNI Director James Clapper, and the office of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including but not limited to former FBI Director James Comey, regarding the collection of memos known as the “Steele Dossier.”

The SCWB replied in a tizzy, asserting that the non-compartmented version of the ICA had no dossier reference (which is true) and stating that his analytical scrub of the classified non-compartmented version did not include anything represented to be dossier materials (also true).

He then went on to repeat the rumor about what Clapper said about the dossier that also had been publicly debunked for years.

I was asked by NIO Cyber [ ] to participate in the analytic scrub of the non-compartmented version of what I think is the 2017 ICA referenced below. It included no dossier reference that I recall.

• I was not / am not in all of the Russia compartments, and so I did not participate in the crafting of the compartmented version
• At no point did [] suggest that there was any analytically significant reporting that I was NOT seeing, with the exception of compartmented material (I asked repeatedly, because of analytic concerns I held regarding a KJ that remain unresolved to this day.)
• At no point did I see or consider what I gather is, or was represented to be, ‘dossier’ materials.

I did hear second hand from [], ostensibly recounting words of then DNI Clapper, on the day of a briefing to current [then, I think, just elect] POTUS, about inclusion of dossier materials in a presentation to POTUS elect. This was characterized as an unexpected and unwanted sudden and unilateral act by then DIR FBI Comey, and as a source of concern to the DNI.

To this day, I have never seen or reviewed dossier materials in a work setting. I did recently hear them referenced by two colleagues in terms consistent with the email below, which struck me as concerning and at odds with my personal experience working election issues during 2015-2017.

• With that single, recent exception, other than the email below, at no time in my IC career has ‘dossier’ material ever been represented to me in a work setting as something the NIC viewed as credible, or that was influential in crafting NIC products.

Once the dossier was in the ICA — and Clapper addressed that in public testimony in May 2017 — then its briefing to Trump was inevitable.

After another exchange, the SCWB ratcheted up his tantrum.

3. IF the Dossier material WAS used by the NIC, unless it is also compartmented, my NIO intentionally deceived and excluded me from things I was cleared for and had need to know, throughout his entire tenure here. I prefer to think that isn’t true, but if it was, we have a problem.

4. IF instead, Shelby or [] are mis-speaking about what the NIC was considering in its’ analyses, it’s a pretty reckless idea to fling out in an FOUO email.

The recklessness was and remains SCWB’s. No one said the dossier had been included in the analysis; he projected that onto the email sent him. And while Tulsi has studiously avoided releasing the annex that spoils her propaganda, Chuck Grassley did, revealing this caveeat:

We have only limited corroboration of source’s reporting in this case and did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment.

Further, the annex does compare the dossier with compartmented intelligence, meaning its classification was sound.

He simply made it up to have a tantrum.

In his later whistleblower complaint, he obscured the false rumor on which this was all based, claiming only he “had been led to believe that the prior- DNI Clapper viewed the ‘Steel Dossier’ material as untrustworthy.” That doesn’t excuse adhering to that for years, long after it was debunked.

And he seemed to concede that in the original email he had blown an “annex” out of proportion. To sustain his tantrum, he said that this would be a potential inappropriate use of classification,” except he bases that on a claim that the dossier was “widely available” in the press when it didn’t become available until five days after the ICA release.

I thought this meant either the premise of the FOIA email was incorrect – or – that “Steele Dossier”-related material was held in CAP channels, which seemed like a potential inappropriate use of classification for something so widely available in the open source press. If the material had actually been a “factor,” or, even just attached to a compartmented ICA, and whether the 2017 ICA’s judgements were valid, or not, it seemed that (and other NIO) had been actively misleading me, and potentially other NIC deputies, for several years.

By 2023 when he submitted this, all the evidence that he was wrong about the dossier and wrong about the briefing was public. But he nevertheless still stewed on his resentment that was based on those mistaken beliefs.

2019 to 2023: Whistleblower’s complaint

Starting after SCWB’s dossier tantrum in 2019, he started making complaints, first to management, and then to Inspectors General. But for much of that period, he wasn’t so much trying to make a complaint; he was trying to share information with John Durham. After the ICIG told him, in 2022, that they had no way to facilitate that referral, he tried to reach out to Durham’s office directly.

2022: Durham outreach

Tellingly, Tulsi doesn’t include the backup to SCWB’s DNS theories, so there’s no way to assess whether his theories are anything more than conspiracy theory (though, as noted, he himself sourced them to a deeply problematic court filing). He describes speaking to someone from the office (though he clearly didn’t believe the person did have ties to the office), but was put off because of ongoing trials.

[] replied to the effect that the Special Counsel was busy with upcoming trials, but that they would get back to me. Following conclusion of that trial, no contact from or anyone in DOJ was forthcoming. I was never asked to interview, or to attest to any of the events, or for a more detailed description of my concerns.

You really get the sense that SCWB was beginning to lose it by this period.

For example, nowhere does he seem to consider the many ways in which Durham’s own conspiracy theories about DNS were destroyed in the first trial — again, that was public. There was no real DNS theory left afterwards, so it is unsurprising that no one from Durham’s office reached out, in the wake of two humiliating acquittals, to further pursue theories that their own prosecutions had debunked.

January to June 2023: A belated DNS panic

A year after the Michael Sussmann trial disclosed that the FBI’s investigation of the Alfa Bank DNS anomalies was a shitshow, and weeks after Durham released his report trying to fudge that fact, SCWB renewed an attempt started years earlier to share a hypothesis with Durham: that the intrusions into some voting-related servers in 2016 were in fact fabricated by the people (he still falsely believed) had fabricated the Alfa Bank anomalies themselves.

The palpable frustration that no one responded to his concerns are fairly common for whistleblower attempts of any sort. All the more so for theories that have been debunked in a trial and Special Counsel report.

SCWB’s paranoid conspiracies

As I said above, I’m sympathetic with some of SCWB’s complaints. He’s entitled to refuse to budge on the ICA’s key judgments. He’s entitled to question the analytical rigor of assessing only one country’s media campaign (though by his own description, he did that after the fact).

But as someone who reconstructed the conflict between himself and Nguyen, six years later (that is, long after his mistaken beliefs had been debunked), as SCWB himself refusing to “abandon my tradecraft standards” and adhering to the “‘religion’ of analysts,” clinging to such paranoid conspiracies is inexcusable.

Though it does prove lucrative when your paranoid conspiracies happen to tell the incoming DNI and President precisely what they want to hear. If my understanding of SCWB’s identity is correct, he has served in a White House position advising on cybersecurity and now likely participates in the grift of Golden Dome. In the age of Trump, adherence to paranoid conspiracies is very lucrative.

But, unfortunately, they also lead to the United States purging key intelligence resources.

There are two main thrusts of Judge Richard Berman’s opinion refusing the government’s stunt request to unseal the Jeffrey Epstein grand jury materials.

First, he emphasized the victims’ rights and explicitly said DOJ had not given them enough notice of their request.

There is another compelling reason not to unseal the Epstein grand jury materials at this time, namely possible threats to victims’ safety and privacy. The Court received a very compelling letter, dated August 5, 2025, from three leading victims’ rights attorneys, who have stated: “[A]ny disclosure of grand jury material–especially material that could expose or help identify victims in any way–directly affects the CVRA’s [18 U.S.C. §3771] fairness, privacy, conferral, and protection guarantees.” [citation omitted] These attorneys represent “numerous survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, including several individuals whose names and identifying information appear in the subject materials.” Id. at 1. Whether victims do or do not favor unsealing, it is imperative that victims have adequate notice of unsealing and adequate timem to respond in advance of disclosure. See id. at 2.

Victims did not have sufficient notice before the Government filed the instant motions to unseal.

His opinion continued to focus on the victims, quoting several Jane Does and Annie Farmer. He twice recalled the powerful testimony from the victims after Epstein’s death in 2019. He insinuated that DOJ would not — and probably is not — protecting the victims as they share information with Congress.

Against that background, Berman noted that the government said it would, itself, release the files.

A significant and compelling reason to reject the Government’s position in this litigation is that the Government has already undertaken a comprehensive investigation into the Epstein case and, not surprisingly, has assembled a “trove” of Epstein documents, interviews, and exhibits. And the Government committed that it would share its Epstein investigation materials with the public.

[snip]

The Government’s “Epstein Files” are sui generis. They are investigatory and not subject to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e).

The Government is the logical party to make comprehensive disclosure to the public of the Epstein Files. By comparison, the instant grand jury motion appears to be a “diversion” from the breadth and scope of the Epstein files in the Government’s possession. [citing Engelmayer] The grand jury testimony is merely a hearsay snippet of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged conduct.

Berman actually went easier on DOJ than I thought he might. As noted, DOJ violated the CVPA in its approach to this. He seems worried they’re doing the same in sharing documents with Congress.

But the answer remains: Todd Blanche can’t get his “hearsay snippet” released through Berman.

On Monday, House Judiciary Committee made available two sets of documents I’ve already covered:

• The contents of the Crossfire Hurricane binder, as released
• A cherry picked selection of 302s from investigations into leaks about Trump’s ties to Russia (see my post here)

On Tuesday, Tulsi Gabbard announced she was stripping the clearance of 37 current and former spooks, in a thinly veiled political purge. NYT provides background on some of the people Tulsi purged, including Vinh Nguyen, who was purged because he allegedly pressured Tulsi’s so-called whistleblower to affirm conclusions in the 2017 ICA, but who had remained in active service as a crucial contributor to NSA’s quantum computing efforts until this purge. This purge clearly places loyalty to Trump over America’s most crucial intelligence efforts.

Add these 37 people to the long list of those who been purged in service of Trump’s invented grievance about the 2016 election:

• Fire many of FBI’s top Russian experts at the FBI.
• Retaliate against experts.
• Expose recent CIA recruits.
• Appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe as top spies, all of them Useful Idioms for Russia.
• Fire more of FBI’s top Russian experts at FBI.
• Elimination or down-grading of programs used to reign in Russia, including FARA, FCPA, Foreign Influence Task Force, and KleptoCapture.
• Assign an incompetent idiot, Steve Witkoff, to carry out negotiations with Russia.
• Refocus of organizations fighting hacking and foreign election interference.
• Fire two top officials on the National Intelligence Council.
• Fire six professionals at National Security Counsel, followed by Alex Wong and eventually Mike Waltz — a number of whom were more hawkish on Russia.
• Reassignment of many experts on the National Security Counsel.
• Fire NSA Director Timothy Haugh and NSA General Counsel April Doss.
• Quantum computing expert Vinh Nguyen, Shelby Pierson, who had warned about Russian tampering in the 2020 election but had been serving in a senior position at National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and at least one other active spook, along with 34 others.

I’ll return to the way that Tulsi continues to use the hoax about Russia as an excuse to purge those who might contest Russia. The degree to which Russia has milked Trump’s grievances to destroy US capabilities against it is one of the reasons I view the 2016 operation as the most successful intelligence operation of recent history.

But for now, I want to show how these two efforts work in tandem, but also show that Tulsi’s purge actually helps to confirm that Trump “colluded” with Russia in 2016.

Back in 2023, I did a post on the releases to Judicial Watch (release 1, release 2) of the Crossfire Hurricane binder, which led me to conclude it was one dumbass binder. In that post, I developed a rough list of what was included in the binder, what was withheld from JW under FOIA, and what was listed as pending when Trump created the binder in 2020. We can compare my earlier list with what has been currently released, which I put into a table here.

These are close to but not quite matching documents. There were 270 pages omitted entirely from the JW FOIA (I noted only the larger chunks of withheld documents in my list). The current release omits the June 29, 2017 Carter Page FISA application, which is 121 pages.

That leaves roughly 16 pages that were in the original Crossfire Hurricane binder (as reflected in the JW FOIA) not reflected in the current release, though most if not all of those pages reflect the tracking of requests Trump made to DOJ, some of which appear in the current release as Tab numbers, some of which had not been fulfilled by the time Trump’s team put together the binder in January 2021. Two are identified: Request 14, for materials on Michael Sussmann or other Perkins Coie lawyers, and Request 17, for a meeting between Bruce Ohr and Andrew Weissmann about money laundering. Three, Requests 1, 5, and 6, are not identified.

I’ve put more analysis below, which addresses how badly cherry picked this binder was. In addition to intentionally burning Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, as well as FBI’s informant confidentiality promises, this binder told a Russian spy story, not the story of the investigation.

But for now, I want to focus on the Mike Rogers 302 which had previously been released in heavily redacted form as part of Jason Leopold’s FOIA in 2020. The comparison of the two releases all but confirms that only Rogers’ 302 was included in the binder, even though Robert Mueller interviewed all of Trump’s top spooks back in 2017. The inclusion of Rogers, but not Rick Ledgett, likely helps to explain why Ledgett was purged along with 36 other people yesterday.

The 302 doesn’t help Trump’s current case all that much.

For example, it records that Rogers was the one who, “suggested the information [from the Steele dossier] be included in an annex or appendix rather than in the nearly one page summary he had seen.” That is one of the alleged crimes at the core of the HPSCI report, here attributed to the guy Trump treated as his most favorable government witness in 2020.

Some of the rest of the interview undercuts claims that Crossfire Hurricane investigators were trying to harm Trump. Notably, Rogers remained ignorant of the Mike Flynn prong; but he also explained that the collection on Flynn would have targeted the people he spoke with.

Much of the rest of the interview — and the reason, I suspect, why Trump included this in his dumbass binder — focuses on a March 26, 2017 conversation that Trump had with Rogers, which was the subject of public reporting in 2017, including a Nakashima/Entous story that was likely of interest to the leak investigation. It includes this language:

According to ADM Rogers’ recollection of the call and the memo, President Trump expressed frustration with the ongoing investigation into Russian interference, saying that it made relations with the Russians difficult. ADM Rogers noted that when President Trump speaks, he tends to talk in long strings and it is not immediately clear what he expects to be answered and what is rhetorical. The President often doesn’t pause for an answer before continuing to talk. During the call, President Trump disagreed with definitive assertions that the Russians were responsible for the hacks and said it was impossible to tell who was actually responsible for the hacking. He also said it was making it hard for him to deal with the Russians, and asked ADM Rogers what he thought. ADM Rogers acknowledged it was does make relations difficult, but then explained in detail, but at a high level, the intelligence supporting ADM Rogers’ confidence, and the rest of the community’s, that the Russians were behind the hacks. President Trump stated they would have to “agree to disagree” on the matter. [two lines redacted under Other Government Agency redaction] President Trump then asked ADM Rogers if he would say “that” publicly. ADM Rogers interpreted “that” to mean [one line redacted under Other Government Agency redaction]. ADM Rogers told President Trump he could not do that, as he did not and could not discuss USPERs in unclassified settings. President Trump did not ask him to “pushback” on the investigation itself, but he clearly did not agreement with the assessment of the Russian involvement.

This passage is not all that helpful to Trump either. The FBI released this even as Tulsi is attempting to undercut claims that Russia did the hack-and-leak, but it reaffirms IC certainty that Russia was behind the hack. It proves Tulsi is lying now!

It also makes it clear that Trump went to great efforts to clear the way to fulfill his commitments to Russia in 2017, with no success.

That Rogers interview took place one day before Rick Ledgett’s interview, the 302 for which remains mostly redacted.

The Mueller Report explains (in a section likely pertinent to Edward Gistaro’s inclusion on Tulsi’s purge list as well) why having just Rogers’ side of this exchange would be of interest.

On March 26, 2017, the day after the President called Coats, the President called NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers.347 The President expressed frustration with the Russia investigation, saying that it made relations with the Russians difficult.348 The President told Rogers “the thing with the Russians [wa]s messing up” his ability to get things done with Russia.349 The President also said that the news stories linking him with Russia were not true and asked Rogers if he could do anything to refute the stories.350 Deputy Director of the NSA Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, said it was the most unusual thing he had experienced in 40 years of government service.351 After the call concluded, Ledgett prepared a memorandum that he and Rogers both signed documenting the content of the conversation and the President’s request, and they placed the memorandum in a safe.352 But Rogers did not perceive the President’s request to be an order, and the President did not ask Rogers to push back on the Russia investigation itself.353 Rogers later testified in a congressional hearing that as NSA Director he had “never been directed to do anything [he] believe[d] to be illegal, immoral, unethical or inappropriate” and did “not recall ever feeling pressured to do so.”354

347 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 3-4.

348 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.

349 Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 1-2; see Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.

350 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4-5; Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.

351 Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.

352 Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2-3; Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.

353 Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 5; Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.

Rogers claimed Trump made no ask of the NSA Director, but he only gets there by claiming that you can never tell when Trump is making an ask. Ledgett claimed that this was the most “unusual” thing he had experienced in 40 years serving the country, which is probably why he chose to document it.

Now consider those two redactions. Per the WaPo story that led to this interview, the ask was a request to deny evidence of “collusion,” which Rogers deferred by saying “he did not and could not discuss USPERs in unclassified settings.”

Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.

Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.

[snip]

“The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,” a former senior intelligence official said of the request to Coats.

But Rogers’ answer — and the redaction — only makes sense if they were speaking of specific evidence of “collusion,” not the absence thereof. The quote to WaPo makes it clear that the source believed there was affirmative evidence of “collusion.”

That is, the redaction strongly suggests that Trump asked Rogers not to deny “collusion,” but to deny that the intercepts NSA had implicating Trump’s closest aides (and likely his son and son-in-law, though NSA may not have discovered all of those yet) confirmed “collusion.”

So on Monday, Jim Jordan celebrated the release of a Mike Rogers 302 the redactions to which suggest Trump asked Rogers to lie. And on Tuesday, Tulsi purged the guy who testified he found that disturbing.

Additional analysis

Carter Page FISA: As noted above, one of the main withholdings from the current document set that was in the binder on January 19, 2020 is the final Carter Page FISA, which had already been sequestered by FISC at that point. We have every reason to believe at least one version of the full binder went to Mar-a-Lago. That strongly suggests that a sequestered copy of the Page document was found at Mar-a-Lago in the August 2022 search. That, in turn, may help to explain why Kash Patel had to plead the Fifth when testifying to the Jack Smith grand jury: because if that FISA application did go to Mar-a-Lago, then it reflected material over which the FISA Court had special handling instructions, a separate crime.

George Papadopoulos doth protest materials: The binder’s treatment of George Papadopoulos is rather stunning. First, there’s the inclusion of the Joseph Mifsud 302, which like the Papadopoulos 302s from the same period — which are not included — admits to some of their contact, but obscure other parts. There’s nothing credible about this 302, but it is presented as if it helps Trump’s cause.

Meanwhile, the treatment of the Stefan Halper files is wildly uneven. It includes backup materials and the 302s describing how Halper got asked to reach out to Carter Page and others (it also reveals that Halper and Peter Navarro were buddies). The materials include much, if not all, of Halper’s conversations with Carter Page. But the single solitary scrap of his reporting from conversations with Papadopoulos is a cherry picked fragment declassified for House Republicans. But it leaves out Halper reporting in which, for example, Papadopoulos discussed monetizing his access to Trump, an effort that underlay his relationship with Sergei Millian. In short, there are vast swaths of the investigation into Papadopoulos left out here, with just Mifsud’s 302 included as stand-in, as if that exonerated Papadopoulos.

Christopher Steele materials: At least a hundred pages of Christopher Steele materials were withheld from the JW FOIA:

• 25 pages of 302s
• 17 pages of materials on Steele’s communication with State Department people
• The 95-page validation document for the Steele dossier

The latter is the most interesting to me, because it is incomplete. As one example, there’s a section about whether there was corroboration for the claim that Trump had agreed to intervene in Ukraine. It mentioned the platform changes and part of Trump’s July 21 comments about NATO, but does not mention that he publicly stated he would consider recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea. And while the date of this report is not marked, it also includes no comment about the discussions between Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik about carving up Ukraine, nor does it mention the floated offer to Michael Cohen.

Similarly, the table is rightly critical about references in the Steele dossier that purport to rely on Millian. But they don’t mention that Millian was saying some of the things about Trump publicly that got recorded in the dossier.

And another timing issue: The table claims there’s no corroboration that the Kremlin was involved in the dissemination of the John Podesta material. There was never a time in 2017 when that was true.

Perhaps the most interesting bit about the Steele material, however, pertains to the John Durham investigation. In many ways, this binder reflects what Durham was asked to investigate. But no Igor Danchenko materials were included in here. That’s fairly stunning, given the extent to which right wingers later incorporated Danchenko’s reporting into their conspiracy theory. All the more so given that the binder makes a big deal that Steele and Stefan Halper were closed for cause, but does not mention Danchenko, who was closed in the same period that Halper was, and for the same reason (that right wingers exposed his tie to the FBI).

David Kendall defensive briefing: One testament of the degree to which this binder was the roadmap for Durham is the defensive briefing given to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, about a Turkish influence operation in October 2015. Defensive briefings make up a big chunk of the Durham report, which attempted but failed to show that Hillary was more favorably treated. The inclusion of it is all the odder given that when Trump and Mike Flynn got a defensive briefing, the FBI did not yet know that Flynn was a willing participant in a parallel Turkish influence campaign.

The list of Republican governors who will uproot Guardsmen from their home, family, and (for many of them) regular jobs to go to DC continues to grow:

• Ohio Governor Mike DeWine
• South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster
• West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey
• Tennessee Governor Bill Lee
• Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves
• Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry

All of these men believe protecting Big Balls is a higher priority than protecting their own constituents.

How soon we forget that the entire reason why Trump invaded DC is that Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, one of the DOGE boys hired by the richest man in the world to snoop through the private heath and social security data of Americans, got beat up by unarmed teenagers?

Big Balls, whose Daddy runs Lesser Evil snack company, graduated from the elite private school, Rye Country Day. Then, in addition to starting Tesla fan sites, Big Balls worked for a an anti-DDOS company that employed reformed criminal hackers, until he was fired for leaking company secrets.

After that, Elon Musk thought it’d be a good idea to give him access to government data, including at Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and, more recently, at Social Security Administration. In spite of the fact that he has neither relevant experience nor a college degree, after DOGE broke up, Big Balls got hired at a GS-15 level, meaning he may make over $150,000 a year.

The DOGE efforts implemented by such inexperienced young men were riddled with problems. At various times, they shut down nuclear weapon protection, Ebola prevention, pediatric cancer treatment. Food sent from American farmers to starving children overseas got incinerated after it was left rotting in warehouses too long. DOGE boys chasing conspiracy theories about Social Security put earned benefits at risk, even purging still-living Americans from the rolls.

All this was purportedly done to hunt waste, fraud, and abuse. But from the start, DOGE made false and often embarrassingly erroneous claims about their savings — even claiming credit for savings made under Joe Biden. Per a recent Politico review, just 4% of the claimed savings were real, a 96% overstatement of their claimed savings.

And so this 19-year old, brought to DC to fiddle with government data, was out past 3AM one night in August. According to stories based on the police report, his girlfriend walked towards her car close to Logan Square, when a group of teenagers demanded the vehicle. They allegedly assaulted Coristine, who suffered a bloody face and a concussion. But cops arrived on the scene during the assault and the perpetrators fled. Two suspects, a 15-year old girl and a 15-year old boy, both unarmed, were arrested that night and have been charged with attempted carjacking.

And this is why the President has taken FBI officers off the crimes which they uniquely hunt — chasing terrorists, spies, and hackers — and had them patrol the streets of DC where they’ve been making DUI arrests.

And this is why six Republican governors are uprooting their own citizens to send to DC.

The claims Trump made about crime in DC to justify all this are false: while violent crime definitely spiked during COVID, it has been falling.

Even Trump’s own appointees agree. Trump’s then US Attorney for DC, Ed Martin, bragged about a 25% drop in crime during the first 100 days of Trump’s term. FBI Director Kash Patel even predicted that the murder rate was on track to be the “lowest in recorded history.”

But the decision by most of these governors — DeWine and McMaster and Lee and Reeves and Landry — to send their state’s National Guard to DC to hunt crime is especially reckless given that, with the exception of West Virginia, all the states have more serious violent crime problems than DC.

The most dangerous city in the US is in Lee’s Tennessee, three are in DeWine’s Ohio, three are in Landry’s Louisiana. Tennessee and Louisiana rank third and fifth worst for violent crime. Jackson, MS was called America’s murder capital last year and Mississippi the state with the highest murder rate (Louisiana was second). And as maps from Phil Bump show, in both Louisiana and South Carolina there are a bunch of places that are more dangerous than DC.

In short, it’s not just that these right wing governors are sending their constituents away from their homes, their families, and often their jobs, but they’re sending their Guard away to a safer place than their own state, all to avenge a privileged kid with criminal hacker ties whom DC cops helped as the crime was happening.

I’m sorry for Big Balls’ plight. I was mugged at knife point — in a Republican-led state — when I was just slightly older than him and it left me shaken. Unlike Big Balls, the cops never found the perpetrators, as far as I know.

But I’m even sorrier for the men and women that are being sent away from home by their governors as a political stunt, when — if Guard patrols really help to address violent crime — they could be addressing the problem closer to home, in their own states. Those men and women have to leave their homes because a kid who hangs out with the richest man in the world got assaulted, not because DC has the kinds of crime that require a six-state invasion to fix.

Update: I forgot to mention that Ashley St. Clair, who bred an Elon Musk child and claims she’s broke, slammed Big Balls in her first podcast “Bad Advice,” episode.

I have it on good authority Big Balls is dining out on this. … This is how empires die, guys, not with foreign invasion, but with government troops to protect the testicular reputation of a guy whose primary skill is shitposting. Rome had bread and circuses. We’ve got medals for getting your ass kicked.

She also coins, “non-committal breeding vessels.” Not at all bitter.

Forty days after Dan Bongino had to take a day off from work because he was so emotional about the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up, Todd Blanche appointed a babysitter for the podcast host.

Missouri’s far right wing Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, will serve as co-Deputy Director, which before Blanche arrived and turned DOJ into a vehicle for sex trafficking cover-ups, was never a thing.

Here’s how WaPo reported the appointment.

“Thrilled to welcome Andrew Bailey as our new FBI Co-Deputy Director,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on social media Monday evening. “As Missouri’s Attorney General, he took on the swamp, fought weaponized government and defended the Constitution. Now he is bringing that fight to DOJ.”

Fox News Digital first reported on Bailey’s appointment. Both Attorney General Pam Bondi and Patel provided comments to the outlet celebrating the move.

Multiple news outlets reported that Bailey was considered for a top Justice Department or FBI position at the beginning of the administration, but the president opted not to nominate him.

The FBI deputy director position does not require Senate approval and it was unclear how Bongino and Bailey will split the responsibilities of the job.

Bailey arrives at the FBI at a time when the bureau is facing intense criticism from Trump supporters over its handling of the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Before their positions at the FBI, Patel and Bongino had spread conspiracy theories about the case, suggesting that the FBI during the Biden administration covered up key details of the investigation to protect powerful people who may have participated in sex crimes alongside Epstein.

The move comes just as the FBI announced it will miss the deadline for turning over Epstein files to Congress, the kind of moment that might require better cover-up skills than releasing an obviously altered video as “proof” that Epstein killed himself.

Now, on the one hand, it’s easy to laugh your ass off at this move, which is tacit confirmation that Bongino is nowhere near as competent as, say, Andrew McCabe.

Bongino has wailed about how hard this job is. So now, I guess, he has a job share, the kind of accommodation you might make for someone with inadequate qualifications for the job.

On the other hand, I have suspicions that this is not so much about the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up and Bongino’s manifest incompetence. The move comes shortly after Kash Patel fired two senior officials, along with the agent who had been flying his plane (who also played a role in the Mar-a-Lago search and the Peter Navarro arrest).

The FBI has forced out at least three senior officials who found themselves at odds with President Donald Trump’s administration, including a former acting director who resisted demands to fire agents involved in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to people familiar with the dismissals.

Brian Driscoll, who briefly served as acting head of the bureau during the first weeks of Trump’s second term, was fired by senior leaders this week and will finish his last day Friday, said three people familiar with his departure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced personnel move.

Driscoll was given no reason for his firing, the people said. But during his brief tenure at the top, he earned the respect of much of the FBI’s rank and file after he resisted orders from Trump Justice Department appointees to identify hundreds of agents who had been involved in the Capitol riot investigations, which agents feared could signal a wider purge.

“I regret nothing,” Driscoll wrote in a farewell message to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. He added, “Our collective sacrifices for those we serve is, and will always be, worth it.”

Also dismissed this week were Steven Jensen, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, and Walter Giardina, an agent involved in the investigation that sent Trump’s former trade adviser Peter Navarro to prison, the people familiar with the matter said.

The firing of Driscoll and Jensen would already have required a new organizational structure, from the reorganization that Kash pushed through in March.

But I can’t help but thinking about the number of sensitive investigative steps at FBI that require high level approval — most famously, FISA warrants.

Everything at FBI runs according to the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (one, two), a big unwieldy guide meant to prevent the abuses of J Edgar Hoover. Not only do certain sensitive investigations — say, of journalists or members of Congress — require high level approval, in some cases from the Deputy. But the Deputy owns the document.

If you get a competently corrupt Deputy (Bongino certainly doesn’t have the competence) you could dismantle those protections in order to make the FBI a far more politicized entity.

Perhaps most notably, the appointment of Bailey comes the day after DOJ appealed a judge’s ruling that the FTC’s investigation of Media Matters repeats past attempts to infringe on the NGO’s First Amendment rights — a ruling in which Bailey’s own politicized investigation of Media Matters figured prominently.

Mr. Musk responded on November 18, 2023, by promising to file “a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters.” Id. ¶ 38 (quoting Elon Musk (@elonmusk), X (Nov. 18, 2023, 2:01 am), https://perma.cc/X4HN-PLJ4). He claimed that “activist groups like Media Matters . . . try to use their influence to attack our revenue streams by deceiving advertisers on X.” Id. ¶ 39 (quoting Elon Musk (@elonmusk), X (Nov. 18, 2023, 2:01 am), https://perma.cc/X4HN-PLJ4). As he saw it, Media Matters had “‘manipulate[d]’ advertisers and the public by ‘curat[ing]’ and ‘contriv[ing]’ in order to ‘find a rare instance of ads serving next to the content they chose to follow.’” Id. ¶ 39.

The next day, on November 19, 2023, Stephen Miller, the current White House Deputy Chief of Staff, in response to a post on X about the Media Matters article, stated that “[f]raud is both a civil and criminal violation” and that “[t]here are 2 dozen+ conservative state Attorneys General.” Id. ¶ 40 (quoting Stephen Miller (@StephenM), X (May 17, 2022, 11:12 am), https://perma.cc/5X5H-5QLN). Just a few hours later, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey replied to Mr. Miller’s post: “My team is looking into this matter.” Id. ¶ 41 (quoting Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey), X (Nov. 19, 2023, 4:46pm), https://perma.cc/J463- 656K). And the next day, on November 20, 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton “announced that he was launching an investigation into Media Matters, purportedly under Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act.” Id. ¶ 42. That same day, Mr. Musk’s X Corp. sued Media Matters and Mr. Hananoki in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. See id. ¶ 45 (citing X Corp. v. Media Matters for Am., No. 4:23-cv-1175 (N.D. Tex Nov. 20, 2023), ECF No. 1).1 And in the “weeks and months” that followed, “X Corp., through its international subsidiaries, filed suits in Ireland and Singapore.” Id. ¶ 46

[snip]

And the Court again granted a preliminary injunction on August 23, 2024, concluding that the Missouri CID likely amounted to First Amendment retaliation. See Media Matters for Am. v. Bailey, No. 24-cv-147, 2024 WL 3924573 (D.D.C. Aug. 23, 2024). Media Matters and the Missouri Attorney General ultimately settled their dispute in February 2025.

We know that Bailey likes to use the power of government to infringe on Democrats’ constitutional rights.

Which makes his appointment as FBI Deputy exceedingly dangerous.

WaPo had an exceptionally good summary of what happened in the European leaders’ meeting with President Trump yesterday. In just the first three paragraphs, it described the speed, the unity, the goal, and the outcome — effectively, to make it clear Putin remains the obstacle to peace.

In hurried D.C. summit, Europeans try to bend Trump away from Kremlin

Leaders of European and NATO countries presented a united front Monday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, after racing to Washington hoping to steer President Donald Trump away from some of the concessions he appeared ready to grant the Kremlin to end the war in Ukraine.

After several hours of meetings, sharp differences remained evident between the leaders and Trump, who declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready for peace, even as he has continued his bombardment of Ukraine and demanded that Kyiv make sweeping, painful concessions to stop the war.

But Ukrainian and European leaders appeared encouraged by Trump’s openness to security guarantees for Ukraine, which Putin might not accept. That could make the Kremlin the obstacle to Trump’s peace deal, insulating Ukraine from having to choose between untenable concessions of territory and inviting Trump’s ire.

Over eight articles, that was more than the NYT could muster.

In addition to an article on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s suit (which WaPo matched) and an entire article on a letter attributed to Melania Trump shared with Putin, barely updated with mention of Olena Zelenska’s letter to Melania, NYT had two separate articles on flattery, one professional, one from MoDo’s protégé, Shawn McCreesh. (WaPo did dedicate an article on how many times Europeans thanked Trump.) What feels like NYT’s main story on the meeting — bylined by Maggie Haberman, David Sanger, and Jim Tankersley — measured the meeting in terms of a peace deal (that is, Trump’s perspective), not Ukrainian security; it was placed in the upper right corner of the front page, not where a main story would be. The top-left story, in that lead position, instead focused on whether Zelenskyy could trust Trump, still making Trump the hero of the story. Sanger also wrote a short article on what it would take for a military force to be credible. Then there’s the Five Takeaways article that seemed to understand none of the dynamic laid out in WaPo’s first three paragraphs.

Yet even the professional NYT story on the effort to use flattery, by Neil MacFarquhar, still missed several dynamics of the effort. It focused on the immediate, apparently successful, stalling of Trump’s capitulation to Putin.

But there is a larger goal to the flattery and it’s not just to help Trump achieve a meaningful peace deal (as distinct from a political win). As WaPo described in ¶12, this is about the security of all of Europe.

Monday’s unusual group meeting at the White House continued an extraordinary sequence of diplomacy that could shape security in Europe for a generation, with European leaders fearing that Putin was getting the upper hand in the breakneck peace effort. Trump reveled at Monday’s tableau, saying that the White House had never seen such a collection of prime ministers and presidents, all of whom dropped what they were doing to rush to Washington to try to salvage Ukraine’s security.

The goal was to prevent Trump from capitulating to Russia and in the process leaving Europe vulnerable to follow-on attacks. The goal of flattering Trump was, presumably, if not to persuade him (for example, that the cease fire idea he abandoned because Putin told him to, is necessary), then to present the unanimous commitment to the things Steve Witkoff naively claimed Russia also backed, starting with security guarantees.

Along the way, Zelenskyy and the others made asks — for powerful US weapons to use to fend off Russian attacks, for troops (presumably including troops from NATO countries, along with Ireland) in Ukraine to guarantee the peace, for a face-to-face meeting that would position Zelenskyy as Putin’s equal — that will be impossible for Putin to accept. The last of those, a face-to-face meeting, is one of the things Trump discussed when he spoke with Putin during the meeting, like calling for a lifeline; as WSJ reports, Russia is already equivocating on that goal.

There are several possible outcomes of publicly celebrating goals that Witkoff (whom Michael Weiss has dubbed “Dim Philby”) claims Russia wants, too. Most immediately, it might get Trump to sour on Putin again, and demand Putin make some concessions or face sanctions. Barring that, it would help create the perception that Trump’s capitulation is just that, an embrace of Putin’s plan that doesn’t offer what Trump wants to claim it does, which will make Trump’s capitulation more politically costly for him. And if that happens, it matters that both the leader of the EU and of NATO were in DC backing Ukraine: Those are the alliances that Trump would need to snub to make that capitulation, with all the significance it holds.

Trump wanted to do this for free. Putin wanted Trump to do this for free. It was part of the point, for Putin. The visit thwarted that plan.

Perhaps my favorite moment in the public events of the day came when Trump invited Alexander Stubb, Finland’s President, to speak. Stubb golfs with Trump and so is chummy with him (which didn’t prevent Trump from not recognizing him), but his country is among those that Russia would target if Trump were to enable follow-up attacks. Stubb labeled Russia’s invasion as a war of aggression but reminded that even small countries can withstand such invasions, as Finland did after WWII.

Some of the international media might wonder, “Why is the President of Finland here?” I think the reason is probably that we might come from a small country, but we have a long border with Russia, over 800 miles. We’ve our own historical experience with Russia from World War II, the Winter War, the War of Continuation. And if I look at the silver lining of where we stand right now, we found a solution in 1944, I’m sure that we’ll be able to find a solution in 2025 to end Russia’s war of aggression. The situation is very difficult but that’s why we’re here.

A Finn, from a country with the lived experience of facing down Russia, promised that “we” — which might include Trump or not — will find “a solution to end Russia’s war of aggression,” a war that extends far beyond Ukraine.

Sure, Donald Trump didn’t give the Europeans the sycophantic treatment he accorded Putin.

But because they played to his narcissism, it provided a platform to make the case that most American journalists won’t make, one which most of Trump’s handlers are incompetent to make: That if Trump does capitulate, it will not serve peace.

Here’s what NYT doesn’t seem to understand, for its flood of flattering portrayals of Trump as the hero of all things.

Other people, when they rush to play to the man’s narcissism, do so with specific goals and a clear sense of how his narcissism makes him easy to manipulate.

A man so easily swayed by flattery as Trump is, is weak, not the hero of all things the NYT portrays him as. And only if you understand that can you make such flattery useful.

Update: NYT has since added this analysis, which is far better at describing the state of play.

There’s a great deal of normalcy bias in the reporting on Trump’s capitulation. NYT reports (based on watching the Sunday shows) that Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff “hint” that Putin will make concessions to reach a plea deal with Ukraine, without questioning whether those are anything but personal inducements to Trump (like a Trump Tower) and without noting that Wikoff is incompetent to understand what would be a real concession in any case. WaPo describes that Putin was willing to offer security guarantees, without noting that guarantees without NATO are useless (and one of the tools Putin has used to lull his imperial victims in the past).

Curiously, one place that is not suffering from normalcy bias is WSJ’s editorial page, which notes what is being shared with “friendly media” (seemingly excluding WSJ from that moniker) are “worse than worthless.”

The President went into the summit promising “severe consequences” if there was no agreement on a cease-fire. He left the summit having dropped the cease-fire with no consequences in favor of Vladimir Putin’s wish for a long-term peace deal as the war continues. Mr. Trump took new sanctions on buyers of Russian oil off the table.

Mr. Trump also said the burden is now on Ukraine to close the deal. European leaders told the press that, in his conversations with them, Mr. Trump said Mr. Putin demanded that he get all of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which would mean that Ukraine give up its main line of defense in the east.

White House leaks to friendly media suggest Mr. Putin promised that, in return for Donetsk, he’ll stop his assault and won’t invade other countries. No wonder Russian commentators and Putin allies were celebrating the summit’s results. Their President ended his isolation in the West, made no public concessions, and can continue killing Ukrainians without further sanction.

Mr. Putin’s promises are worse than worthless. He has broken promise after promise to Ukraine and the West. This includes the 1994 Budapest Memorandum promising to defend Ukraine against outside attack, and multiple Minsk agreements. He wants Donetsk because he would gain at the negotiating table what he hasn’t been able to conquer on the battlefield. It would also make it easier to take more territory when he or his successor think the time is right to strike again.

The silver lining is that European leaders say Mr. Trump told them Mr. Putin had agreed to accept “security guarantees” for Ukraine. The suggestion is that the U.S. might even be one of those guarantors, albeit outside NATO. But Mr. Trump provided no details.

For guarantees to have real deterrent effect, they would have to include foreign troops in Ukraine. Kyiv would need the ability to build up its military and arms industry.

All this is distracting from the question not asked at the Sunday shows yesterday: Why Trump’s team walked out of their meeting with Putin looking like they had seen death.

Let’s recap what got us here:

• Some weeks ago, Trump gave Putin the 50 days the Russian president wanted before he would come to the table. Then, as Putin kept bombing, making Trump look weak, Trump shortened the timeline to ten days. But instead of imposing the sanctions that Lindsey Graham had spent months crafting, Trump instead sent Steve Witkoff to Moscow. Witkoff, by design (because this is what happens when you choose to put someone with no relevant expertise or temperament in charge of negotiating deals), came back promising deals he couldn’t describe, it’s just not clear for whom.
• On an impossibly short notice, Trump arranged to host Putin on former Russian land. Going in, Trump promised that if Russia didn’t deal on a cease fire, there would be tough consequences. Europeans and Volodymyr Zelenskyy smelled a rat, but didn’t succeed in convincing Trump how badly he would be manhandled.
• And manhandled he was. Sergei Lavrov showed up wearing a CCCP jersey, Putin displayed undisguised contempt for everyone. And Trump walked out looking ashen. Putin treated Trump like a menial client.
• Trump told Sean Hannity that he shouldn’t have done his interview right afterwards, and I wonder if he had not — if Trump had not felt it necessary to immediately declare a success, ten of ten — then Trump’s team might have tried to find a way out. But whatever Trump then said to Zelenskyy and European leaders made them realize things were worse than they anticipated.
• Trump sent out Rubio and Witkoff on the Sunday shows to basically defer, making transparently bullshit claims of concessions from Russia. But today, Trump is making it clear that he will made demands Zelenskyy cannot accept — the Crimea recognition Trump floated to get elected in 2016, and no hopes of NATO membership — even while suggesting that Zelenskyy will have to make all the concessions.

Effectively, Putin ordered Trump to make Ukraine capitulate. Hell, maybe he even gave Trump a deadline.

And I would be unsurprised if Trump does what happened in February, after he bullied Zelenskyy, but for which Trump later blamed Pete Hegseth’s incompetence. I would be unsurprised Trump withdrew US intelligence sharing, without which Ukraine cannot defend itself, possibly even halting the sale of weapons to Ukraine.

But the implications of all this are much larger. These demands, particularly the demand that Ukraine turn over the part of Donetsk that Moscow has never conquered, would leave Ukraine defenseless. Conceding these demands would make Zelenskyy vulnerable (indeed, one of Russia’s puppets in Ukraine is already challenging his leadership). Ukraine really is the front line of Europe — of Moldova (with elections scheduled in September), of Czechia (with elections scheduled in October), of the Baltics, where Putin has been staging for some time.

And remember: one of the promises Trump floated during the election, one of the promises that — Nicolay Patrushev said — is why Russia helped reinstall Trump is that Trump limit intelligence sharing with Europe, all of it. Europe relies on that intelligence to combat Russia’s influence operations within Europe. Without that intelligence, one after another country would fall to a pro-Russian party.

Since returning to office, Trump has dismantled every tool the US created to win the Cold War. It doesn’t need to be the case that Trump has stashed his Administration with actual Russian agents — narcissism and venality explain much of what we’re seeing — but there are somewhere between two and twenty Trump advisors who I have good reason to suspect are Russian agents. Over the past three years, right wingers have forced the tech platforms to eliminate the moderation that had provided visibility on Russia’s influence operations. As I laid out, Trump dismantled US Russian expertise and the investigative tools created to hunt and prevent Russian influence operations in the US. Meanwhile, he is willfully bankrupting the country based on plans largely adopted in joint venture with Putin client Viktor Orbán.

Trump has made the United States powerless against Russia, and I expect he will be instructed to make Europe powerless against Russia as well.

This is the point I’m trying to convey: All of Trump’s power depends on his continued reinforcement of the disinformation that Russia used to get him elected the first time. Without Russia’s continued indulgence, the foundational myths to Trump’s power would crumble. Particularly amid the willful destruction of US power, it would provide cause — and maybe even the will, among right wingers — to expel and prosecute him.

The hold Putin has over Trump is existential for Trump. And unless we can expose that, the US will increasingly become a mere satellite of Russia.

Trump is not making America great. He is gutting America.

This is not just about forcing Ukraine to surrender.

Trump has surrendered. And going forward, it is only going to get worse.

For months, I’ve been anticipating the possibility that Trump’s politicized prosecutions will backfire, both by empowering the political martyrs they create and by exposing their own corruption.

I’m interested in this for two reasons: first, the possibility that these prosecutions will backfire, not just by creating sympathetic political martyrs, but also by further exposing Bondi and her top aides as liars violating legal ethics.

A package of filings from Congresswoman LaMonica McIver submitted last night suggests that may soon happen.

She has filed four motions:

• A motion to dismiss based on Congressional immunity
• A motion to compel discovery on the broader circumstances of her visit to Delaney Hall on May 9
• A motion to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution based on a comparison with January 6 defendants
• A motion to require DHS to withdraw false prejudicial claims about McIver

Two crucial details lie behind all of them.

First, according to Body Cam footage provided in discovery (and available to Judge Jamel Semper), after Newark Mayor Ras Baraka left the Delaney Hall facility in response to Ricky Patel’s order to do so, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States instructed Patel (listed as V-1 in all the filings) to arrest the Mayor.

Allegation: After the Mayor complied with HSI’s instructions to “leave the secured area,” agents placed him under arrest “in the unsecured area.” Indictment at 2-3.

Evidence: After a phone call, [Ricky Patel] announced a decision to arrest Mayor Baraka: “I am arresting the mayor . . . even though he stepped out, I am going to put him in cuffs . . . per the Deputy Attorney General of the United States.” Ex. B at 1:16:27-1:17:35. Meanwhile, the Members— who were still being prevented from entering the facility—returned to the entrance gate where they learned that the agents were changing course and renewing their plan to arrest the Mayor on baseless charges. Ex. A at 1:26:40-1:26:50; Ex. H, JR Axon Body Camera Arrest.mp4, at 00:30-00:40.

And, according to DOJ’s discovery response to McIver’s initial discovery request, Todd Blanche is signing off on correspondence in this case (possibly because Alina Habba is not a proper US Attorney).

Congressional immunity

Start with the immunity filing. After laying out her election last year (which she notes was a landslide, so let’s hope Trump sees this), McIver describes how starting on her third day in office, she prioritized oversight of immigration matters, with a town hall, a visit to a different detention facility, a letter to Kristi Noem, and a meeting with ICE. She then describes how the video produced in discovery captured her (and Rob Menendez — whose father’s earlier prosecution is the standard for Speech and Debate immunity in the Third Circuit — and Bonnie Watson Coleman) repeatedly describing their visit as congressional oversight.

Body Cam video captured them identifying theirs as a congressional oversight visit when they entered the facility. (This declaration describes the source of each video.)

Allegation: Count One alleges that on May 9, 2025, Congresswoman McIver and her congressional delegation “arrived at Delaney Hall allegedly to conduct a congressional oversight inspection.” Indictment at 1.

Evidence: Representatives McIver, Watson Coleman, and Menendez identified themselves as Members of Congress, explained they were there to conduct congressionally authorized oversight, and asserted their “right to look at the facility” and inspect its “safety, health, [and] services.” See Ex. B, CD Axon Body Camera Pre and Arrest.mp4, at 1:34-2:08.

Other video captured them questioning GEO employees as part of that oversight, while they were made to wait for an hour.

Allegation: The congressional delegation “entered the secured area and proceeded to an interior reception area.” Indictment at 2.

Evidence: The Members were told to remain in that small space for about an hour, during which they were denied access to the facility despite their repeated assertions of statutory authority. Nevertheless, the Members spent that hour pursuing their oversight mission, in part by questioning employees about the facility and its operations. During this time, unbeknownst to the Members, ICE was mobilizing its forces: high-level officials of ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”) reported to the facility; munitions-filled vehicles took formation in its secured parking lot, and approximately 15 armed agents assembled just inside the gates. Ex. B at 6:40-13:30, 16:30-17:23, 20:09-35:14; Ex. A, NEPTZ.avi, at 23:00-23:15, 29:40-29:50, 40:50-41:05; Ex C, Axon_Body_4_Video_2025-05- 09_1418_D01AA954X.mp4, at 00:30-00:44; Ex D, Axon_Body_4_Video_2025-05- 09_1418_D01AA942W.mp4, at 00:37

More video captured McIver citing the law permitting members of Congress to conduct such oversight as ICE started its attack on Baraka.

Allegation: The “Congressional Delegation overheard this conversation and [] protest[ed].” Indictment at 3.

Evidence: Arriving by the Mayor’s side, Congresswomen McIver and Watson Coleman reprimanded the agents for “creating a problem” that did not exist. Congresswoman McIver reiterated that the agents had kept them waiting for “over an hour,” in blatant violation of federal law, and repeated, “We are here to do our oversight visit.” Congressman Menendez summed up the absurdity of the situation the agents had created: “You have an unarmed Mayor of the largest city in the state, and you have two dozen people out here and cars barricading us? This is an act of intimidation and you know it.” Ex. F at 4:32-5:58.

More video describes Patel — one of the purported victims — conceding the legality of the presence of the Members of Congress.

Allegation: An HSI agent, identified in the indictment as “V-1,” explained that “members of Congress had lawful authority to be in the secured area of Delaney Hall, but that” the Mayor “did not.” Indictment at 3.

Evidence: Although the indictment otherwise ignores the oversight context, V-1 verified the Members’ lawful authority, explaining, “congressmen are different, congresswomen are different.” Ex. F at 7:04-7:12.

Video captured the members identifying themselves as such when the melee ensued.

Allegation: As agents moved in to arrest the Mayor, Congresswoman McIver “hurried outside towards the agents” as someone “yelled ‘circle the mayor.’” Indictment at 3. Congresswoman McIver then “placed her arms around” the Mayor. Id.

Evidence: ICE agents, heavily armed and most of them masked, rushed out of the gate to arrest the Mayor where he was on public property surrounded by reporters, his staff, and members of the public. The Members walked through the gate at approximately the same time. Ex. A at 1:26:50-1:26:56. As a crush of over a dozen agents descended on the Mayor, a man called out to “circle the Mayor,” and the Members coalesced around him, holding one another’s arms to remain upright in the crowd. Ex. A at 1:26:50-1:27:08; Ex. I, AG Axon Body Camera Arrest.mp4, at 00:47-00:55. Agents and protestors alike pushed toward the Members, destabilizing the group. The Members repeatedly asserted their federal status and instructed the agents not to touch them. Ex. I at 1:00-1:20. Agents nevertheless pressed in on the Members as the crowd formed more tightly around them.

McIver has mapped this all onto the indictment to prove that to defend the case, McIver would have to submit her actions as a Member of Congress to the jury for scrutiny.

McIver then goes on to argue that she is therefore immune under both Speech and Debate and — citing Trump v. US — separation of powers.

The separation of powers accordingly confers an immunity on the official acts of legislators symmetrical with the immunity for the President’s official acts. The Speech or Debate Clause confers immunity on legislative acts, which represent legislators’ “core constitutional powers,” and are thus absolutely immune. Trump, 603 U.S. at 606. The separation of powers extends further, making clear that legislative immunity also covers official acts, which represent “the outer perimeter of [the legislator’s] official responsibility.” Id. at 596. But that broader scope comes with a caveat: these acts are only presumptively immune. Id. at 614. Immunity for this wider class of official conduct may be rebutted when “the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the” Legislative Branch. See Trump, 603 U.S. at 615 (cleaned up).17 The prosecution cannot do so here.

Motion to Compel

Virtually all of that narrative comes from Body Cam video provided in discovery. There’s one important exception: where an ICE agent shoved McIver so hard that she immediately said she was going to file a complaint.

Allegation: Count Two alleges that “[f]ollowing the arrest of” the Mayor, Congresswoman McIver “pushed past” another agent “using each of her forearms to forcibly strike” the agent “as she returned inside of the secured area of Delaney Hall.” Indictment at 5.

Evidence: After a few short moments, the Mayor made his way to V-1 to submit to arrest, and was promptly dragged back into the secured area and handcuffed. Congresswoman McIver followed, and an agent forcefully shoved her backward before she could reenter the secured area. NJ Spotlight News (@NJSpotlightNews), X (May 9, 2025 15:29 ET), https://x.com/NJSpotlightNews/status/1920926649777852742. Indeed, the agent’s use of force against Congresswoman McIver as she was reentering the facility was so egregious that—unlike the officers responding to the Congresswoman’s actions—she immediately informed an ICE official that she intended to file a complaint. Ex. I at 3:30-3:43. Congressman Menendez reentered with Congresswoman McIver, and Congresswoman Watson Coleman was escorted back through the gates with the help of agents. After the turmoil subsided, the Members were permitted to enter the building and complete their inspection.

That is one of the reasons she filed a motion to compel. She didn’t get Body Cam footage from at least two key ICE officers: the second guy she allegedly assaulted, and the guy who shoved her.

Second, there were as many as 15 uniformed law enforcement officers or agents with BWCs on site; several, however, apparently made no recordings. The lack of videos from those who were wearing BWCs appears to be inconsistent with applicable ICE policy and instructions at the scene from a supervisory agent. Indeed, at least two critical individuals have no BWC footage: the law enforcement agent identified in the Indictment as V-2, who is the alleged victim in Count 2; and another agent who appeared to violently shove Congresswoman McIver in the chest as she attempted to return inside the Delaney Hall gate. A government agent’s deliberate failure to activate a BWC contrary to policy and instructions clearly is relevant to the preparation of the defense. In addition, there were other agents who had no BWC at all.

In the guise of proving the full context of her visit that day, McIver has also asked for other video from the facility (which might provide more proof of the calls to people like Todd Blanche or might explain why a bunch of ICE vehicles arrived while the members of Congress were waiting).

To that end, the defense’s discovery letter requested that the government provide “all interior and exterior surveillance footage of any events on May 9, beginning at least 10 minutes before Congresswoman McIver’s arrival at Delaney Hall through at least 4:00 p.m., which is after she departed the facility’s secured perimeter.” Ex. K, Req. I.A. The government’s response was inconsistent. On one hand, the government indicated that it would attempt to locate and produce “footage of the Representatives’ tour of the Delaney Hall facility after the arrest of Mayor Baraka had taken place,” though it disclaimed the relevance of such footage. On the other hand, the government claimed that it received these two surveillance videos from GEO Group (the private company that ICE has retained to operate Delaney Hall). However, the government claims that other GEO Group materials are not in the government’s possession and suggests that the government has no other surveillance videos from stationary or fixed cameras. The government did not otherwise respond to Congresswoman McIver’s request for more complete surveillance videos, apparently taking the position that this material is not relevant. Ex. M at 1 (“To the extent this letter does not provide the requested materials, it is the position of the Government that those materials do not fall within the ambit of Rule 16”).

She’s also seeking the communications of everyone present pertaining to whether they were assaulted or not.

Although Congresswoman McIver may seek further relief from the Court to require production of those communications as this case progresses, the Court should at least order the government to disclose now:

VII.A. All contemporaneous text, voice, instant, chat or email messages – sent via either Telegram, Signal, or any other communications method, application, or medium – to, from, between, or among anyone present at Delaney Hall on May 9, 2025 and anyone else affiliated or associated with the GEO Group, DOJ, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, ICE, HSI, or DHS describing, reflecting, or implying that any government employee present on May 9 at Delaney Hall did not experience or report harm, injury, danger, or fear as a result of Congresswoman McIver’s actions.

VII.B. All written, verbal, or other reports or statements – whether or not memorialized – by any government official, individual affiliated with GEO, member of the public, or anyone else that is inconsistent with the charge that Congresswoman McIver knowingly, intentionally, or forcibly assaulted, resisted, opposed, impeded, intimidated, or interfered with federal officials on May 9.

These requests concern statements that show a lack of harm, injury, or fear by the alleged victims of the Congresswoman’s charged conduct.

Again, there’s a very sound reason to demand these communications based on the charges. But the video and the communications might also explain the involvement of Todd Blanche, Alina Habba, and Kristi Noem.

Selective Prosecution

Which brings us to the selective prosecution filing. As I said a million times when covering Hunter Biden’s selective prosecution bid (which I think might have survived if he had had money to appeal), these are almost impossible to win because you have to prove that someone similarly situated was not charged.

But McIver does that one better. She compares how DOJ dismissed all the January 6 assaults, even while charging her.

Just months ago, the Department of Justice dismissed cases against hundreds of defendants involved in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among these dismissals were over 160 prosecutions charging the defendants with violations of 18 U.S.C. § 111 stemming from their assault of federal law enforcement officials who were protecting the Capitol and the Members of Congress and their staff. Video footage showed these defendants throwing explosives, beating federal officers with baseball bats and riot shields, and spraying them with pepper spray, all in an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The Justice Department not only walked away from those charges, but it has since fired career prosecutors, agents, and support staff for their mere participation in the investigations and prosecutions. This case charges Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, a sitting Democratic Member of Congress, with violating the same federal assault statute. But the similarity ends there. As the government concedes in the indictment, Congresswoman McIver was exercising her statutory and constitutional oversight responsibilities when she visited Delaney Hall—a privately run immigration detention facility that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently reopened in her District. Unlike the January 6 rioters, Congresswoman McIver had every right to be on those premises. Indeed, she was there to do her job.

There is also a palpable difference between the actions of those at the Capitol on January 6 and Congresswoman McIver’s conduct. Footage that the government has provided in discovery shows that federal officials made a series of manipulative, irresponsible, and dangerous decisions that placed dozens of bystanders, as well as three Members of Congress, at risk of physical harm. In fact, the video recorded almost two dozen armed agents and officers of ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) surging into a crowd in a public space to arrest the Mayor of Newark for supposedly trespassing on federal land. The government, of course, has since dismissed that ill-conceived and unfounded charge against the Mayor. But during that episode, it was those heavily armed law enforcement personnel who precipitated and were responsible for creating several minutes of physical chaos. In the end, as the indictment implicitly concedes, no federal agent experienced any injury whatsoever.

In that respect, too, January 6 was entirely different. That day, outnumbered Capitol Police officers stood their ground against hundreds—if not thousands—of rioters who were trying to overrun the Capitol to intimidate the legislators inside in hopes of overriding a national election. A substantial number of those brave officers were seriously injured. Yet, the Department of Justice has dropped the charges against over 160 individuals accused of that conduct.

Later in the filing, McIver cites three particularly egregious cases that were still pending when DOJ dismissed all these cases: Daniel Ball, Tim Boughner, and Jake Lang, all of whom were detained pretrial until Trump made their charges go away.

What, McIver ponders, led to the starkly different prosecutorial decisions? Well, there’s proof, in the form of a letter then Acting Deputy Attorney General and now Third Circuit Judge who might preside over any appeal, Emil Bove, sent ordering the firing of a bunch of FBI Agents who had been involved in January 6 investigations.

What explains the government’s insistence on prosecuting Congresswoman McIver, but not rioters charged with serious violence under the same statute? Senior federal officials have made ample public statements that point inexorably to the answer. In particular, the leadership of the Department of Justice, echoing the President’s official proclamation, has described the January 6 prosecutions as “a grave national injustice.”1

1 Mem. from Acting Dep. Att’y Gen. Emil Bove to Acting Dir., FBI (Jan. 31, 2025) (quoting Proc. No. 10887, 90 Fed. Reg. 8331, 8331 (Jan. 20, 2025)), https://perma.cc/C5NB-KV3V.

Motion to Restrain

In support of her selective prosecution bid, McIver also cites the statements that are the subject of her motion to restrain extrajudicial statements:

• A press release accusing the Members of Congress of breaking into the Delaney Hall.
• A Tweet disseminating a heavily edited picture of the alleged assault involving McIver.
• Another press release purporting the debunk the “fake news” correcting prior false claims about the incident.
• Yet another press release implicating McIver in an assault on an ICE officer that happened in California (which ICE was trying to blame on Salud Carbajal).
• One more press release, one of the recurrent ones that claim wildly inflated numbers for ICE assaults, again implicating McIver in those assaults.

For each of the statements, McIver notes how the communications are misleading and how they prejudice her case.

When Kilmar Abrego tried to get DHS gagged, the judge said they weren’t parties to his criminal case. But here, DHS runs the facility where this happened and employs the men who claim to have been assaulted.

McIver is asking for an order that these statements be taken down and threatens to ask for her prosecution to be dismissed if DHS continues such statements.

So here’s how this will all play out: If DOJ wants to sustain this prosecution, they will need to first defend against the Congressional immunity claim — including a potential interlocutory appeal — and Todd Blanche and John Sauer will be held to claims they made last year to get Trump out of trouble. But even as that’s proceeding, Judge Semper may well order DOJ to provide more discovery, either on her normal discovery request or to support the selective prosecution claim. Because, yeah, it is pretty shady that two of the three most important witnesses to this alleged assault somehow don’t have any Body Cam footage, and yeah, it’s pretty shady that DOJ claims not to have access to prison footage that might capture additional calls to DOJ.

Meanwhile, Baraka’s malicious prosecution lawsuit has done nothing since June; perhaps DOJ is thinking twice about defending it? In that case, Ricky Patel made sworn statements to justify Baraka’s arrest that conflict with the evidence here. If he didn’t already know, Baraka has just learned that before Patel made those statements, Todd Blanche personally ordered him to arrest Baraka, even after Baraka complied with Patel’s order to leave the facility. And if this were to go to trial, Patel’s inconsistent statements would be a central focus of the case.

I don’t know how this case will end.

But it won’t end well for DOJ.

Update: There’s one more way this filing may prove useful: the Democratic members of Congress lawsuit against DHS for denying them access to detention facilities. DOJ got a delay in their response, but the MoCs could file an amended complaint.

I’m not going to say I told you so.

I will, however, say that if what I laid out before yesterday’s ass-handing were true, everything would go just as it did.

The meeting started with the red carpet welcome, with everything looking a bit dingy and Trump looking obeisant.

After a last minute switch, replacing the one-on-one, with a shared meeting, Trump and Putin had a short ride in Trump’s limo, with Putin grinning like the Cheshire cat. The meeting was abandoned early. Putin effectively ran the press event afterwards, in which he emphasized Russian demands that Ukraine subject itself to Russia, and Trump doubled down on his disproven claims that Hillary tried to frame him, when in fact Tulsi Gabbard recently released proof that Russia instead framed Hillary. Fully one-fifth of what Trump said was redoubling on the lie that Russia knows Trump knows to be a lie.

We were interfered with by the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It made it a little bit tougher to deal with, but he understood it. I think he’s probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He’s seen- he’s seen it all. But we had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal, but it made it harder for us to deal as a country, in terms of the business, and all of the things that would like to have dealt with, but we’ll have a good chance when this is over.

Trump’s commitment to that lie continued to his interview with Sean Hannity (in which Trump described a second one-on-one moment with Putin after the press appearance). Hannity’s first question was what Trump’s vibe was in the first minutes with Putin, and Trump repeated his claim that “we would have done great things” if not for the “Russia Russia Russia hoax, which stopped us from doing that,” then immediately claimed that the 2020 election was rigged. Then Trump turned to Putin’s claim that if he were President in 2022 the war would never have happened. Later in the interview, when Hannity raised Hillary’s quip that if Trump could make a just peace, she would nominate him for the Nobel Prize and invited Trump to attack Hillary for ruining three years of Trump’s life, Trump said that “she made me tougher.” Trump turned immediately from that to describe that Putin reinforced Trump’s false claims that he had won the election in 2020. And Trump explained why the war would never have happened if he were President: had he remained in office in 2021, then Putin wouldn’t have had to invade.

For Trump, this meeting was about sustaining the lies on which all his power is built: it’s not that Putin put him in charge because he would sell out America. Rather, he’s the victim. And by sustaining that lie, he renewed Russia’s great leverage over him.

Maybe that’s why he has no deal, why Trump told Hannity there’s one big issue Trump and Putin don’t agree on, why Trump’s team was all frowns yesterday, why even Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich described the presser as “very unusual.”

This continued to the Hannity presser. Hannity had to interrupt Trump babbling about tariffs to bring him back to Ukraine. Eventually (about four minutes later), Trump returned to the question of whether he could craft a deal to tell Hannity that he shouldn’t have done the interview.

Trump doesn’t want to talk about what demands Putin made of him.

He does want to cling to the lies that he can only sustain if Russia is willing.

And because of that, Trump allowed Putin to look like he owned the joint.

Which maybe he does.

Listen on spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)