It is, no doubt, terrible that EDVA US Attorney Erik Siebert was forced out yesterday because he refused to charge Tish James with fraud when there’s little evidence she engaged in mortgage fraud.
But there are aspects of the firing that make it epically incompetent and, like the quid pro quo with Eric Adams and the effort to send hundreds of men to a concentration camp beforehand, may backfire going forward.
ABC, which was the first to report on the firing, confirms that Seibert received notice that Trump wanted to fire him on Thursday, which presumably is how both ABC and NBC reported he was expected to be fired in advance of that happening.
Siebert was notified of the president’s intention to fire him Thursday, sources said, and Trump said Friday afternoon in the Oval Office that he wanted Siebert “out” of his position.
That meant that the reason for the firing — the refuse to indict James — was public before it happened.
And even though Trump has reversed engineered a different reason for the firing — it’s not that he’s firing Siebert because Siebert won’t prosecute Tish James, it’s that he was backed by both Virginia’s Democratic Senators, which was true and apparent when Trump nominated Siebert — in the same breath he insisted that Seibert had not quit, but instead Trump had fired him.
Today I withdrew the Nomination of Erik Siebert as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, when I was informed that he received the UNUSUALLY STRONG support of the two absolutely terrible, sleazebag Democrat Senators, from the Great State of Virginia. He didn’t quit, I fired him! Next time let him go in as a Democrat, not a Republican.
Particularly given ABC’s report that Siebert would like to stay on at EDVA as an AUSA, this text, demanding credit for firing Siebert, changes Siebert’s legal options going forward, and the impact of the firing on cases Siebert wouldn’t charge.
Both NYT and WaPo report that Todd Blanche (and Pam Bondi, NYT adds) tried to save Siebert’s job.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who runs the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department, had privately defended Mr. Siebert against officials, including William J. Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who had urged that he be fired and replaced with a prosecutor who would push the cases forward, according to a senior law enforcement official.
Mr. Pulte’s power far outstrips his role as the head of an obscure housing agency. He has gained Mr. Trump’s favor by pushing mortgage fraud allegations against perceived adversaries of the White House, including Ms. James; a Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook; and Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California.
Mr. Pulte has made use of his influence and access to a president who prefers advisers who are willing to push boundaries. He had told Mr. Trump directly that he believed Mr. Siebert could be doing more, according to several officials with knowledge of the matter.
But Mr. Blanche, like Mr. Siebert, questioned the legal viability of bringing charges against Ms. James, according to current and former department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about internal discussions.
WaPo added the unsurprising bit that Ed Martin, who works for Bondi and Blanche, also weighed in to get Siebert fired.
They added that Ed Martin, the Justice Department official who is overseeing criminal investigations based on Pulte’s allegations, also pushed for Siebert to be removed.
Todd Blanche is Trump’s fixer, neck deep in an effort to make Trump’s sex-trafficking problems go away. He has not shied, at all, from enacting Trump’s campaign of revenge. And yet somehow it got reported that Blanche, “questioned the legal viability of bringing charges against Ms. James.”
The firing creates all sorts of headaches for Blanche. All of DOJ knows that Eagle Ed, along with Bill Pulte (who is not a lawyer and whose primary career skill has been benefitting from nepotism) got Siebert removed over Blanche’s objections. But it’s also public that even Blanche agrees there’s no case against James. Who is in charge of DOJ if Eagle Ed, never a prosecutor and prone to embarrassing gaffes when he tries to play lawyer more generally, can override Blanche’s personnel and prosecutorial decisions?
And it’s not just the James prosecution that will be difficult to charge in EDVA, though I can imagine judges there will be very skeptical of this investigation going forward. NYT also reports that Dan Richman, whose testimony prosecutors obtained in an effort to charge Jim Comey for statements he made four years and 355 days ago (meaning the statute of limitation expires in coming weeks), didn’t tell them what they wanted him to.
Mr. Richman’s statements to prosecutors were not helpful in their efforts to build a case against Mr. Comey, according to two people familiar with the matter.
It’s not clear that firing Siebert will achieve the ostensible objective — to install someone who will charge James and Comey, in spite of the evidence. If that were to happen, it might well blow up in epic fashion.
And whatever happens, this badly undermines Blanche’s hold on DOJ (even as various MAGAts have it in for Bondi and/or Kash).
Plus, some Republicans in Congress were already uncomfortable (anonymously) with Pulte’s tantrums.
“I think he’s a nut,” one House Republican said of Pulte. (Like others in this story, the lawmaker was granted anonymity to speak candidly about sensitive dynamics within the Trump administration.)
“The guy’s just a little too big for his britches,” said a second GOP lawmaker, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees housing policy and the FHFA. “I’ve got great respect for Bessent for taking him on.”
Partly that’s concern for the Fed, but it cannot have escaped their notice how easy it is to claim people engaged in mortgage fraud, not to mention the way such concerns could influence Ken Paxton’s challenge to John Cornyn in the Texas Senate primary.
None of that mitigates the dangers of this kind of weaponization. They just make it more likely that efforts to weaponize DOJ will create larger and larger problems for Blanche and possibly even for Trump.
Update: Reuters reports that a woman once investigated, but not charged, for involvement in January 6 has been appointed Acting US Attorney.
A former federal prosecutor who once claimed former President Joe Biden’s administration targeted her for being conservative told colleagues in an email on Saturday that she has been named to replace a top prosecutor who resigned on Friday after President Donald Trump had said he wanted him out.
In an internal email seen by Reuters, Mary “Maggie” Cleary told attorneys she has been “unexpectedly” tapped to be acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. She did not immediately respond to an email from Reuters seeking comment.
Update: Trump has sent (two times, I think) a post berating Pam Bondi for not prosecuting his enemies, and then announced he’ll nominate Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer who served as local counsel in ihs Florida case.
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After Brayan Ramos-Brito was arrested for being assaulted by a Border Patrol officer, after he was held in pretrial detention for a week based on several claims that DOJ later admitted were lies (including that he said he was going to grab guns and shoot the agents, when he actually said he was going to fuck up the border patrol agents), after the initial felony assault charge was dismissed and then charged as a misdemeanor (first on something inaccurately called an indictment, and only later as an Information), and after getting several adverse rulings on motions in limine, Ramos-Brito was acquitted on Wednesday.
According to LAT, a juror said Ramos-Brito was acquitted because the government presented no video evidence showing the assault. Which means senior Border Patrol official, Gregory Bovino, destroyed his credibility for naught.
U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino — the brash agent who led a phalanx of military personnel into MacArthur Park this summer — was called as a witness Wednesday in a federal misdemeanor assault case against Brayan Ramos-Brito, who was accused of striking a federal agent.
Bovino, who flew in to testify from Chicago, the latest city targeted for an immigration enforcement surge, said he witnessed the alleged assault committed by Ramos-Brito in Paramount on June 7.
Bovino was questioned by the defense about previous comments he made referring to undocumented immigrants as “scum.”
[snip]
On a cross-examination, federal public defender Cuauhtemoc Ortega questioned Bovino about being the subject of a misconduct investigation a few years ago and receiving a reprimand for referring to undocumented immigrants as “scum, filth and trash.”
Bovino said he was referring to “a specific criminal illegal alien” — a Honduran national who he said had raped a child and reentered the United States and had been caught at or near the Baton Rouge Border Patrol station.
“I said that about a specific individual, not about undocumented peoples, that’s not correct,” he said.
Ortega pushed back, reading from the reprimand, which Bovino signed, stating that he was describing “illegal aliens.”
“They did not say one illegal alien,” Ortega said. “They said you describing illegal aliens, and or criminals, as scum, trash and filth is misconduct. Isn’t that correct?”
“The report states that,” Bovino said.
Not only did Bovino lead the staged invasion of MacArthur Park (which featured in Charles Breyer’s opinion ruling that DOD had violated the Posse Comitatus Act), but he’s the one who tried to menace Gavin Newsom during his announced plan to redistrict California. And he was caught lying to a jury.
Among the things Ramos-Brito was not permitted to do was conduct attorney-led voir dire to find out if anyone had seen Acting US Attorney Bill Essayli’s false propaganda about the arrests, posted on Xitter the day of the incident and still posted today, even after the dismissals and acquittal — yet more lies DHS and DOJ have told about the assaults that DHS officers have caused.
Sydney Reid
Meanwhile, in DC, DOJ asked to prevent Sydney Reid, who was accused of assaulting FBI agent Eugenia Bates while she was filming the ICE arrest of two people at the DC jail, from introducing the following evidence at trial:
That Bates called her “boo boos,” “boo boos”
That Bates twice complained that she had to turn this thing into an assault charge:
“I’m going to the attorneys [sic] office for a bystander that I tussled. Dinko arrested her for ‘assault’ ughhh”;
“Do you want the arrest EC separate from the ‘assault’ or am I good to put it in together in one 302”
That she called Reid a “lib tard”
The government appears to have no complaint if Reid introduces Bates comment that she said of her “boo boos:” “I sacrificed life and limb for the mission. I think it’s worth a trump coin,” which Reid included in her response.
Still, DOJ badly wants to prevent Reid from presenting evidence that not even Bates believed this was an assault.
Brad Lander
Yesterday, the government arrested Brad Lander, again, along with dozens of others, once again for protesting the treatment of ICE targets inside Federal Plaza.
At least 11 elected officials were arrested Thursday while protesting conditions at an immigration holding facility in Manhattan where a federal judge this week extended a court order requiring the government to shape up its treatment of detainees.
The officials, including Comptroller Brad Lander, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, State Senator Julia Salazar and Assemblywoman Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas, were among dozens of people detained during protests at 26 Federal Plaza. The government building, home to immigration court, the FBI’s New York field office and other federal offices, has become a hotbed of arrests and detention amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Several officials were arrested inside the building while attempting to inspect holding rooms on the 10th floor that are the subject of ongoing litigation alleging squalid conditions and overcrowding, according to a coalition of politicians, advocates and faith leaders involved in the protest.
The arrests came in the wake of an order from Judge Lewis Kaplan requiring that DHS treat those being held at 26 Federal Plaza humanely.
The Court’s preliminary injunction will not prevent defendants from pursuing the policies they have set. It merely will require that they conform to the demands of the Constitution in doing so. It is up to defendants to choose whether they wish to expend resources to conform 26 Fed to those requirements, or to alter the rate at which they are funneling arrestees into 26 Fed and other facilities, or to select or obtain facilities where detainees can be held in a humane and constitutional manner.
Here, plaintiff has demonstrated clear and imminent irreparable harm in the absence of a preliminary injunction and a likelihood of success on the merits of his First and Fifth Amendment claims arising from the substandard conditions and barriers to attorney-client communication at 26 Fed. Because the injunction would halt ongoing constitutional injuries while merely requiring adherence to standards defendants have already adopted for their immigration detention facilities across the country, the balance of the equities and the public interest decisively favor plaintiff.
This time, Lander wasn’t assaulted as he was arrested, and the government released those protesting with summonses.
But DHS continues to try to criminalize opposition to its abuses.
LaMonica McIver
Which is why two aspects of the LaMonica McIver response are notable.
One of McIver’s motions was to get DHS to take down a series of egregiously false claims that DHS and its propagandist, Tricia McLaughlin, had made about the incident at Delaney Hall. The government’s response to this was similar to that offered in the Kilmar Abrego case — that DOJ did not control DHS.
As an initial matter, it should be noted that the U.S. Attorney’s Office does not exercise authority over DHS even at a local level. Nevertheless, this Office has communicated with DHS to request that DHS remove the postings to which Defendant objects. To the extent that DHS does so, McIver’s motion will be moot.
But while DHS had not removed the offending propaganda before the court filing, they now have done so.
Nevertheless, DOJ cited some of those very same propaganda posts, which McIver also cited in her selective prosecution filing, in arguing that threats against DHS have gone up astronomically. (I’ve color coded the three references so you can see how they correspond.)
Since then, and as reflected in the multiple press releases and articles referenced by McIver, assaults and threats against DHS officers have increased exponentially.12 According to DHS, ICE officials faced an 830 percent increase in assaults between January 21 and July 14, 2025, compared with the same period in 2024.13 Seemingly recognizing the dangers that DHS officers have been uniquely facing, McIver “introduce[ed], as her first bill in Congress, the DHS Better Ballistic Body Armor Act, which would increase the availability of protective body armor designed to fit the bodies of female agents.” ECF 20-1, at 8. DHS also introduced a new policy for the protection of law enforcement officers requiring notice for a visit to its facilities, noting that the policy was “made in response to ‘a surge in assaults, disruptions and obstructions to enforcement, including by politicians themselves.’”14 In response to the DHS policy, on July 30, 2025, 12 Members of Congress filed a civil Complaint against ICE objecting to the new policy and seeking injunctive relieve.15 McIver, who was at Delaney Hall to conduct oversight, is neither a named plaintiff nor mentioned in the Complaint.
12 See, e.g., ECF 20-1, at 13 n.23 (article quoting DHS official that ICE law enforcement officers faced a 413 percent increase in assaults against them at the time), n.25 (DHS press release claiming “[a]ttacks and smears against ICE have resulted in officers facing a 413% increase in assaults”), n.26 (DHS press release discussing alleged disclosure of an ICE agent’s information by Democratic Congressman Salud Carbajal, and a subsequent alleged assault on that agent during an enforcement action); see also n.23 (article discussing incident involving Senator Alex Padilla where U.S. Secret Service purportedly “thought he was an attacker’” during a DHS press conference).
13 Id. at 13 n.27 (Press Release, Department of Homeland Security, DHS Announces ICE Law Enforcement are Now Facing an 830 Percent Increase in Assaults (July 15, 2025) (emphasis omitted), available at https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/07/15/dhs-announcesice-law-enforcement-are-now-facing-830-percent-increase-assaults).
14 Michael Gold, ICE Imposes New Rules on Congressional Visits, N.Y. Times (June 19, 2025), www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/us/politics/ice-congress.html; ECF 20-1, at 14 n.28; see also Homeland Security (@DHSgov), X (July 11, 2025, at 6:28 PM) (posting on X that “sufficient notice to facilitate a visit . . . is essential to keep staff and detainees safe”), https://x.com/dhsgov/status/1943799482342109463?s=46&t=-VXhB76r-zYF5BuEUXYkQ.
15 Complaint, Neguse v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 25-CV-02463, ECF. No 1 at 64 (D.D.C. July 30, 2025).
McIver cited these links not for the truth, but to demonstrate that as part of an effort to evade oversight, DHS was lying its ass off.
The events at Delaney Hall marked the first of three times ICE forcefully detained officials investigating its activities in the course of a month.23 And DHS has since pursued a press strategy to undermine congressional oversight authority over its facilities. Even before the end of the May 9 visit, DHS issued a press release falsely describing Congresswoman McIver and the other Members as having “stormed the [Delaney Hall] gate and broke[n] into the detention facility,” calling the visit “a bizarre political stunt.”24 A week later, DHS issued a news release to “[d]ebunk” the notion that the visit to Delaney Hall “was ‘oversight’”—“it is actually trespassing and put ICE officers and detainees at risk.”25 DHS renewed this rhetoric in July, issuing a third press release related to Congresswoman McIver, this time suggesting that her actions were “just another case of Democratic lawmakers labeling political stunts as oversight while they endanger the safety of ICE personnel.”26 DHS doubled down on that framing the next day, stating in yet another new post that “Democratic members of Congress,” including “Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ),” have “been caught red-handed doxing and even physically assaulting ICE officials.”27
23 Compl. ¶¶ 31-32, 43 Baraka v. Habba, 25-cv-06846 (June 4, 2025), ECF No. 1; Michael Williams et. al, US Senator Forcefully Removed From DHS Event in LA, Triggering Democratic Outcry on Capitol Hill, CNN (June 12, 2025), https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/12/politics/alexpadilla-removed-noem-press-conference; Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Brad Lander Is Arrested by ICE Agents at Immigration Courthouse, N.Y. Times (June 17, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/nyregion/brad-lander-immigration-ice.html.
24 Press Release, DHS, Members of Congress Break into Delaney Hall Detention Center (May 9, 2025), https://perma.cc/G6MH-2KXF.
25 Press Release, DHS, DHS Debunks Fake News Narratives About Law Enforcement During Police Week (May 16, 2025), https://perma.cc/9XKE-3K3U.
26 Press Release, DHS, ICE Employee Attacked by Rioters After Congressman Doxes Him to Mob at California Marijuana Facility (July 14, 2025), https://perma.cc/3GNL-PWE6.
27 Press Release, DHS, DHS Announces ICE Law Enforcement are Now Facing an 830 Percent Increase in Assaults (July 15, 2025), https://perma.cc/7YZP-PGWS.
The only one of four withdrawn press releases that DOJ did not cite here is the one falsely claiming that members of Congress arrived to Delaney Hall on a bus. They’ve also subsequently posted another bullshit post (which repeats a false claim McLaughlin made about the ICE assault of Christian Enrique Carias Torres, whose case has also been dismissed), to make sure their slander of Congressman Carbajal remains accessible.
DOJ’s use of these false (and now withdrawn) press releases creates the illusion that the new policy, unlawfully requiring a week’s notice before members of Congress conduct oversight at a detention facility, was set up in response to the assault alleged against McIver.
To claim there is “clear evidence” of discriminatory intent supporting her selective enforcement claim, McIver points to three areas: 1) press statements issued by DHS that are sharply critical of her conduct on the day she arrived at Delaney Hall to conduct an unscheduled inspection tour; 2) the implementation of a new DHS policy after the charges were against her were filed that applies to all Members of Congress requiring them to give seven days prior notice of an oversight inspection tour of certain immigration facilities; and 3) the detention/interaction by law enforcement with three Democratic politicians including Defendant within the space of approximately one month. See ECF 20-1, at 13-15, 22-23.
[snip]
Relatedly, Defendant points to the DHS policy enacted after the events at Delaney Hall on May 9, 2025, requiring Members of Congress to give at least seven days’ notice in advance of conducting an oversight inspection tour of an immigration detention facility. Defendant believes this is somehow evidence of discriminatory intent in conducting an “enforcement action” against her even though the policy was enacted after McIver had been charged. The logic of this claim is elusive, especially when the policy, at least in part, furthers the legitimate purpose of avoiding situations like that which occurred on May 9, 2025, by ensuring that appropriate security measures may be taken in advance of such an oversight visit.
All of this, of course, is an attempt to narrow the issue to what happened after Todd Blanche ordered Ricky Patel to arrest Newark Mayor Ras Baraka even after Baraka left Delaney Hall, rather than include details of the decision — from the guy now in charge of this prosecution team — to criminalize someone who had followed the orders of a cop.
To the contrary, the jury will hear such details only if McIver introduces them over the Government’s Rule 401/403/jury nullification objections. But even if those objections are overruled, the speech or debate analysis focuses on what the Government has alleged (and, thus, how the Government will prove it), not on how the defendant hopes to defend herself. Here, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that McIver violated 18 U.S.C. § 111(a)(1), the Government will prove that on May 9, 2025, she used her forearms to forcibly strike a federal Agent who was attempting to arrest someone outside the gate to Delaney Hall, and she used her hands to forcibly grab and pull at that agent’s jacket. ECF No. 1 at 5, ¶¶ 13,14 and 16. Nothing about that touches on oversight activities.
This goes to the heart of separation of powers issues, which is why McIver’s attempt to rely on Trump v. US has real merit. Todd Blanche ordered agents from a different agency to arrest someone — Newark’s Mayor — trying to conduct oversight, even after he had left the premises. After discovering that arrest was based off false claims, they’re now trying to criminalize the physical conflict — including what McIver said in real time was an assault of her — that resulted. And in this filing, they rely on that effort to criminalize conducting oversight to excuse their unlawful attempt to evade oversight with the week notice requirement.
Over and over, DHS has been caught lying about assaults on its officers, presenting assaults of arrestees as instead assaults on their officers.
And in McIver’s case, they’re trying to double down on withdrawn propaganda to claim the problem that Todd Blanche caused can be pinned on Congressional oversight.
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For some time, I’ve been noting that Donald Trump has chosen his political martyrs poorly. Every person he takes out in his authoritarian abuse could serve as one more person who will inspire others to fight back.
I wasn’t specifically thinking of Jimmy Kimmel, whose show ABC suspended after Brendan Carr complained about the things Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk’s killer.
But sure, Kimmel’s suspension removes a familiar voice from the living rooms of a certain aging demographic, but more importantly, points to the system of power behind the suspension: not just the cancel campaign to silence discussion of Charlie Kirk’s real statements, but Brendan Carr’s egregious politicization of the FCC, and in response, the abject cowardice from multinationals like ABC, Sinclair, and Nexstar. While Carr absolutely made inappropriate comments as a regulator (see Mike Masnick for a predictably excellent post on why his comments were illegal), the specific means by which Carr silenced Kimmel was the learned helplessness of massive corporations putting speech considerations behind their hopes of regulatory approval for expansion.
The Kimmel suspension comes as Larry Ellison’s family moves to take control of vast swaths of public speech in the US. David Ellison bought Paramount Skydance and promptly set about replacing news with Bari Weiss’ propaganda, and now Larry looks set to acquire TikTok and probably Warner Brothers.
Then, if all goes according to plan, Mr. Trump could soon hand an 80 percent stake in TikTok, the powerful social media platform, to the existing shareholders, among them KKR and General Atlantic, plus a new consortium that includes Mr. Ellison’s Oracle and a16z, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm whose co-founder Marc Andreessen is close with the administration.
There’s more: The Ellisons are also, reportedly, preparing a bid — of perhaps $80 billion, according to some estimates — for Warner Bros. Discovery, the media conglomerate that controls such jewels as HBO Max, the Warner Bros. movie studio and CNN.
Jimmy Kimmel’s plight is a good way to make the consolidation and control of the media by oligarchs and Trump flunkies visible and meaningful to people who otherwise wouldn’t care. So depending on what happens (he has not yet been fired and so might capitulate to demands Sinclair is making of him, and it’s not clear how long he’d remain under contract if he tried to quit), this could be a really useful teaching opportunity for people who hear Kimmel but not more political actors.
But I wasn’t thinking about Kimmel. I have used the phrase with people like Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University activist and Green Card holder threatened with deportation based on his advocacy for Palestinians. Last week, a Louisiana immigration court approved the Administration’s attempt to retcon their retconned basis to deport Khalil (a claim he made a misrepresentation on his change of status petition, as opposed to his speech itself), putting his bid to stay in the country on fast track before an immigration appeals court. In a letter sent yesterday to the court that ruled his deportation unconstitutional retaliation for Khalil’s speech, his attorneys described how absent outside action he may soon be deported to Algeria or Syria.
On September 12, the IJ issued three separate orders denying Petitioner’s (1) motion for an extension of time, (2) motion to change venue, and (3) application for a waiver, without conducting an evidentiary hearing. (Copies of each order are attached as Exhibits A, B, and C.)
[snip]
Respondents’ continued pursuit of Petitioner’s removal on the Post-Hoc Charge and these latest, highly unusual developments—including Respondents’ decisions to move forward with the waiver process on a compressed schedule despite seeking and obtaining a partial stay of that courtordered requirement and to deny an ordinarily granted waiver without the normal hearing—is part and parcel of Respondents broader effort to retaliate against Petitioner for his constitutionally protected expression in support of Palestinian rights. It represents a substantial threat to Petitioner’s liberty, family integrity and if ultimately removed, his physical safety.
Petitioner now has thirty days from September 12 to notice an appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). In light of the above, and given statements targeting Petitioner by name for retaliation and deportation made by the President and several senior U.S. government officials, undersigned counsel have ample reason to expect that the BIA process—and an affirmance of the IJ’s determination—will be swift. Upon affirmance by the BIA, Petitioner will lose his lawful permanent resident status, including his right to reside and work in the United States, and have a final order of removal against him. Compared to other courts of appeals, including those in the Third and Second Circuits, the Fifth Circuit almost never grants stays of removal to noncitizens pursuing petitions for review of BIA decisions. 4 As a result, the only meaningful impediment to Petitioner’s physical removal from the United States would be this Court’s important order prohibiting removal during the pendency of his federal habeas case. See ECF 81 (ordering pursuant to the All Writs Act that, “Petitioner shall not be removed from the United States, unless and until this Court issues a contrary order … to preserve the Court’s jurisdiction, so that the Petition can be reviewed and ruled on”). And nothing would preserve his lawful permanent resident status.
Back when Khalil was the center of focus, I really did believe that his charisma and poise might keep a focus on Marco Rubio’s egregious actions to deport people based on speech. That hasn’t happened. I learned of these latest developments from press releases from his lawyers and saw someone compare the First Amendment attack on Khalil with that on Kimmel. But any focus on Khalil’s plight has been replaced by 100 other abuses. Trump’s minions are still working overtime to silence Khalil, just like Kimmel; they’re just using different means — means that are (and have been ruled to be) a more direct assault on the First Amendment.
And that brings me back to the concerns I raised here.
There’s a lot that’s terrible. But even a lot of the good things that are happening escape notice, largely from the two forces that buried Khalil’s fate: surging mobs of attention, corporate control on news, and the resultant increased difficulty in finding good news anymore. Corporate news and most existing social media is already broken and dying. One reason it was easy for ABC to suspend Kimmel is he’s no longer the fixture he used to be.
Ben Collins (who bought the Onion and has been fighting to take over Alex Jones’ empire) responded to yesterday’s news by describing this as a market opportunity.
Collins is right: because mass media is largely dead, there is an opportunity to build up new media that is both more trusted because it is not subject to Carr’s threats and on that basis popular, a media that can compete with whatever slop the Ellisons are putting out.
But until we get there and likely even after, we need to find ways to bridge the gaps in the media environment right now. We need to do so to ensure that stories — of people like Khalil, of the families being destroyed by Stephen Miller’s attacks, the impact of RFK Jr’s assault on public health, the disastrous effects of Trump’s financial policies — keep getting told. We need to convey what Democrats are actually doing, such that criticism is based on reality, rather than outright fabrications. The biggest challenge, Democrats need to be engaged in a media environment shared to the extent it is possible to hold Republicans, from Trump on down, accountable among those who normally support them.
Trump and Carr’s assault on the media — accompanied by their oligarch friends’ attempt to buy it all up — is an attempt to disrupt all that accountability. For now, at least, it’s actually possible to bypass those dying media outlets. But it takes work. And awareness.
And whatever else the Jimmy Kimmel suspension does, it provides that moment of awareness. It provides a wake-up call that we need to lay the foundation to bypass the oligarch-owned media.
Updated: Corrected Collins’ name. Curse his Bluesky handle!
During the Kash Patel hearing yesterday, Chuck Grassley threw a bunch of new documents out to create a distraction: New informant reports targeting Hunter Biden, several documents he already declassified, and what has been taken to be a single document about the Jack Smith investigation.
He did so, presumably, to point to this entry noting that Jack Smith collected information affecting Turning Point USA — Charlie Kirk’s organization.
I think the item, a subpoena, may not be what it appears. It appears the subpoena itself was served on Event Strategies, the entity which produced January 6, not TPUSA itself. I’m fairly certain that the investigation into the 80 busses TPUSA paid for was investigated earlier, in the first year of the investigation, along with a bunch of other entities that sent busses.
What’s more interesting is it appears that these are two separate documents (indeed, Grassley’s press release refers to “documents”). The most obvious sign of that is that the first page, described as a summary, is dated 1/23/2023. Whereas the other five pages — which appear to match the title of the document, Arctic Frost Bank Record Subpoenas — show subpoena returns with dates long after the date of the summary, going through a subpoena pertaining to Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman to Fidelity completed on July 6, 2023. [Note: The release of this document exposes the banks of dozens of Trump associates, a fairly alarming privacy violation.]
The five pages of subpoenas focus on several topics, largely the following:
J6 $
Wire fraud
Misappropriation
Payments to lawyers
Bogus investigations
Obstruction
Credit reports
Most of this traces several prongs of investigation that were publicly reported at the time — largely picking up efforts of the January 6 Committee — showing that Trump raised money in the guise of election integrity, but then paid it to people like Brad Parscale or Dan Scavino.
Based on dates, this appears to be a key focus of Jack Smith once he was appointed. This was one prong of the investigation I had hoped would be — but was not — in Jack Smith’s final report.
But it’s barely reflected in the summary dated January 23, 2023.* There’s one line of effort, “Financial Fraud: Allegations of false/misleading representation to raise money post-election.” There’s one possible crime, 18 USC 15343, that might be the applicable crime (or, given that it accompanies 18 USC 371, the charge ultimately focused on the fake electors). But there’s no sign of any campaign finance crimes.
And it’s not entirely clear that the summary is complete. After all, there’s one crime — 18 USC 241, Conspiracy against Rights — ultimately charged against Trump that doesn’t appear at all.
And whether there are more pages to this summary or not, it’s a dated summary. The investigation continued at least six months after that summary, and (given that details from Mike Roman’s phone only appeared in later filings), probably more.
Chuck Grassley and Kash Patel seem to have released a distraction, one targeted to exploit the Charlie Kirk murder, rather than the most informative document it could have.
* A word about timing. DOJ convened a dedicated grand jury on January 31, 2022. The summary is an FBI document, which starts from April 2022, reflecting the delay described in this famous WaPo story. I suspect that the summary reflects only things that happened after April 2022, because known investigative steps — such as those targeting Sidney Powell in September 2021 — don’t appear in it.
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The Brits have finally found some people to arrest in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal: at least four people who projected images of Epstein and Donald Trump onto Windsor Castle.
Kaitlan Collins used that event as a pretext to grill Todd Blanche about his so-called proffer with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
Todd Blanche’s responses were an incredible insult to survivors.
When Collins dug in, repeating her question, Blanche then effectively said — more than seven weeks after the interview — that he has never tested the credibility of Maxwell’s answers (which would be hard to do given the firing of Maurene Comey).
Todd Blanche confessed that he had moved Ghislaine Maxwell to comfier digs without first vetting the answers that Maxwell gave him.
Perhaps realizing how stupid that confession was, Blanche then said something even more astonishing. He claimed the entire point of the “proffer” was, “to give her an opportunity to speak, which nobody had done before.”
It’s rank bullshit that no one has given her an opportunity to speak. She had the right to testify in her own defense at trial, a right she declined. The day before Blanche did this “proffer,” the Oversight Committee subpoenaed her, in response to which she delayed testimony.
But even if it were true that poor Ghislaine Maxwell has never had a chance to tell her side of the story, has never had a chance to make claims her attorneys didn’t make in cross-examination during her trial, why in god’s name is the Deputy Attorney General of the United States wasting two days of his time, with neither adequate preparation to hold her accountable nor a prosecutor familiar with the case, giving a convicted sex trafficker a special opportunity to tell her story?
Effectively, Todd Blanche described that his DOJ is running a special service for select sex traffickers who have damning information on Blanche’s client, Donald Trump, where they get the privilege of telling their story in a venue largely free of repercussions. There’s no conceivable purpose for such a “proffer” besides to keep her silent.
KC: We’re here at Windsor Castle and tonight images of him with Jeffrey Epstein were actually projected on the castle behind me. People were arrested as a result of that. But this comes after you sat face to face with Ghislaine Maxwell for nine hours. Do you believe her?
TB: I mean, listen, I think that people are gonna do what they’re gonna do, they’re gonna say what they’re gonna say. And there’s a lot of important work that we’re doing every day. And so the fact that that is still what we’re focused on today in the wake of everything that’s happening and the week of the work of what President Trump’s doing over the next several days is incredibly unfortunate. But we’re gonna keep on doing our job and keep on doing what we need to do.
KC: But when you met with her did you find her to be credible?
TB: It’s an impossible question to answer. I met with her for two days. To determine whether a witness is credible takes weeks and weeks and weeks. I asked her questions that I believed all of us wanted answered. And she answered them. She answered them, I didn’t — the point of the interview was not for me to pressure test every single answer she gave. Of course not. The point of the interview was to give her an opportunity to speak, which nobody had done before. And so she had been — she had been in prison for many many years. And she had offered to speak on many many occasions. And she was never given that opportunity. And so what I did is I gave her that opportunity to speak, it was recorded, my questions were there, and whether her answers were credible or truthful, there’s a lot of information out there about Mr. Epstein, about her, and whether what she said is completely wrong, or completely right, or a little of both, is for — that’s the reason why we released the transcript, that’s why we were transparent about the questions I asked, and the answers shes [sic] gaves [sic] is because it’s really up to the American people to determine whether they believe that her answers were credible. Or whether they found her not credible.
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There’s a footnote about a quarter-way through DOJ’s omnibus response to LaMonica McIver’s package of motions to dismiss the criminal case against her, in which two AUSAs purport to explain something funny that happened with the January 6 pardons: That pending defendants, whose cases Trump ordered to be dismissed, also got pardons.
10 On September 2, 2025, the undersigned Assistant U.S. Attorneys spoke with the Deputy Pardon Attorney from the Office of the Pardon Attorney who confirmed that: (i) the January 6 Defendants with then-pending cases received pardons under the Pardon and were eligible to receive certificates of pardon, and (ii) that any January 6 Defendant was still considered pardoned even if a certificate of pardon was not requested. Additionally, the Deputy Pardon Attorney provided examples of certificates of pardon issued for January 6 Defendants with previously pending cases who requested a certificate.
The two AUSAs in question are Mark McCarren, the only DOJ attorney who has filed a notice of appearance on the case and Benjamin Bleiberg, whose name appears as author in the document properties, but who hasn’t filed a notice of appearance, a tactic that at least one, more senior, DOJ attorney has used to pretend to remain ignorant of case events in other politically sensitive cases.
The men offer no declaration — from either the Deputy Pardon Attorney or themselves — to substantiate this claim. Just a footnote: Yep, January 6 defendants, all of them, got pardons.
The footnote is a crucial part of the larger argument the men use to rebut McIver’s claim of selective prosecution. As I noted (thinking she was being clever), the comparator McIver used to say that others would not have been charged for the actions alleged against her, she argued that the January 6 defendants were not even prosecuted for much more egregious instances of assault. “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.” But this section, the entire response to McIver’s selective prosecution claim, adopts an even more clever approach.
The Jan6ers didn’t have their cases dismissed, as McIver claims, the DOJ response says, but instead were all pardoned.
All of them.
Now, before I explain this argument, I should explain something else.
In addition to McCarren — who filed a notice of appearance — and Bleiberg — who did not, Todd Blanche is on the filing, presumably because Alina Habba has been found, by multiple judges, to be serving unlawfully as Acting US Attorney. Unlike the other cases on which Blanche is signing off, as far as I know, Blanche is intimately involved in this one.
For example, the filing confirms a claim McIver made: that before a bunch of ICE officers including the alleged victim Ricky Patel — all of whom report to Kristi Noem — moved to arrest Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Patel announced “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.”
The SAC then gathered more than a dozen of the ICE officers and agents and announced that after consulting with the Deputy Attorney General, the group would be proceeding out the gate to effect the arrest of the Mayor.
That consultation, followed by Blanche’s inclusion on the prosecution chain of command, creates all sorts of conflicts with this case, not least the claim that ICE’s decision to turn on (some, but not the most important) bodycams before the arrest of Baraka was a decision unrelated to McIver’s oversight role and unrelated to any prosecutorial decision, an argument the omnibus makes in its attempt to rebut McIver’s selective enforcement claim.
None of this establishes that any law enforcement action taken against her was motivated by her Congressional oversight role or her policy views on immigration. But before addressing each of these enumerated claims, however, any “enforcement action” taken against McIver was quite limited, consisting of capturing video footage of her actions via body worn cameras, reviewing that footage and making it available to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for review regarding prosecutorial decisions. The most important of these “enforcement actions” was, of course, the decision to capture the footage depicting McIver’s actions on May 9, 2025. Most of the actions taken thereafter essentially involved reviewing that footage and interviewing prospective witnesses.
Significantly, the DHS agents’ decision to make the body-worn video recordings, which contained the core evidence against McIver, had nothing to do with an “enforcement action” directed at her. Rather, their purpose was to document the arrest of the Mayor. That these recordings captured the illegal actions allegedly committed by McIver was purely serendipitous from law enforcement’s perspective. When DHS officers turned on their body-worn cameras, no one knew that Defendant would barge out of the gate of Delaney Hall and attempt to forcibly interfere with and impede the arrest of the Mayor, for yet a second time, as described in the Indictment. In short, the video documentation of McIver’s allegedly criminal behavior was gathered inadvertently because of her unanticipated and surprising actions, and not because of some illicit motive on the part of DHS agents. That alone defeats her selective enforcement claim, because McIver cannot show “clear evidence” of discriminatory purpose towards her in the agents’ decision to document the Mayor’s arrest.
Worse, a long section addressing the decision to halt Public Integrity consultations — which happened by May 9, because Habba’s office tried to consult PIN on what they claim is something else that same day — reveals that in lieu of such consultations, Habba consulted … Todd Blanche’s office.
Despite the change in policy, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office did in fact consult with ODAG about the Defendant’s case. The substance of that consultation is, of course, privileged.
So Todd Blanche ordered another agency’s men to carry out the Baraka arrest, he or his office provided the “privileged” advice to the prosecutorial team he now leads on whether to charge McIver, and oh by the way why did the AUSAs consult the Deputy Pardon Attorney about what happened at the beginning of the Trump Administration instead of the Pardon Attorney?
Two simple reasons. First, because Blanche fired the Pardon Attorney, Elizabeth Oyer, on March 7, which has itself led to a (FOIA) lawsuit. And, after the Senate refused to confirm Ed Martin — who had been acting as US Attorney for DC even while still representing a January 6 defendant — DOJ made Martin the Pardon Attorney.
All that is interesting because of some discrepancies in the description of what happened, legally, to the January 6 defendants.
A longer passage describes that Trump granted a blanket pardon for “offenses relating to events at or near” the US Capitol on January 6, and “in addition to including almost all of the January 6 Defendants who were convicted and sentenced,” Trump also “broadly pardoned all defendants associated with January 6 who were charged and awaiting trial or sentencing.”
On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued a Proclamation granting a blanket pardon or commutation of sentences “for certain offenses relating to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021” (the “Pardon”).4 According to President Trump, “[t]his proclamation ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.” Id. In an executive order issued the same day (the “Weaponization Executive Order”), President Trump asserted that “the Department of Justice has ruthlessly prosecuted more than 1,500 individuals associated with January 6, and simultaneously dropped nearly all cases against BLM [Black Lives Matter] rioters,” as an example of “weaponization of prosecutorial power” under the prior administration that the administration aimed to address.5
In addition to including almost all the January 6 Defendants who were convicted and sentenced, President Trump, “[a]cting pursuant to the grant of authority in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution of the United States,” also broadly pardoned all defendants associated with January 6 who were charged and awaiting trial or sentencing, and directed the Attorney General to dismiss any pending indictments. See Pardon; see also ECF 20-1, at 19 n.30 (citing NPR article stating “Nearly every defendant, including those who assaulted police and conspired to plan the attack, received a pardon. In 14 cases, Trump granted the defendants a commutation, ending their prison sentence, but leaving the felony on their records.”). Because the Pardon did not give the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) any discretion to continue prosecuting any of the still-pending cases for the pardoned January 6 Defendants, prosecutors immediately began filing motions to dismiss the remaining cases, including the six exemplar January 6 cases McIver cites in her brief. See ECF 20-1, at 5, 18.6
4 Granting Pardons and Commutation of Sentences for Certain Offenses Relating to the Events at or Near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, Proclamation No. 10887, 90 Fed. Reg. 8331 (Jan. 29, 2025), available at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-01-29/pdf/2025-01950.pdf.
5 See Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Exec. Order No. 14147, 90 Fed. Reg. 8235 (Jan. 29, 2025), available at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR2025-01-28/pdf/2025-01900.pdf.
6 Citing United States v. Warnagiris, No. 21-CR-0382 (D.D.C.); United States v. Ball, No. 23-CR-160 (D.D.C.); United States v. Boughner, No. 22-CR-20 (D.D.C.); United States v. Lang, No. 21-CR-53 (D.D.C.); United States v. Amos, No. 24-CR-00395 (D.D.C.); and United States v. Adams, No. 24-MJ-337 (D.D.C.)
The filing claims to be relying on the pardon itself for the claim that defendants with pending trials were pardoned. But that’s not what the pardon said. It created 3 categories:
Some but not all of those convicted of sedition, who got commutations but not pardons
“[A]ll other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” who got pardons
Individuals with pending indictments, about whom the pardon instructed only to dismiss their cases with prejudice.
I further direct the Attorney General to pursue dismissal with prejudice to the government of all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Note, there are a number of ways to show that DOJ did exercise discretion. For example, Jeremy Bertino, one of the 14 whose charges were purportedly only commuted, had to have his charges dismissed because he had not yet been sentenced. And for defendants accused of January 6 crimes plus other things — like CSAM possession found in conjunction with searches of their phones or stalking Barack Obama after getting his address from Donald Trump — DOJ has exercised a great deal of prosecutorial discretion in deciding which of those other charges to hold Trump’s mob accountable for. In short, the pardon was a legal shitshow, and DOJ has spent the months since them making shit up — another word for prosecutorial discretion.
So while I have no doubt that the pardon was treated, in part by current Pardon Attorney Ed Martin and in part by current Third Circuit judge Emil Bove (who is not mentioned in this filing even though McIver quoted him as exercising prosecutorial discretion in her own filing), as if it extended to the pending defendants, while there’s no doubt that the Pardon Attorney has been handing out pardon certificates like candy to any Jan6er who asks, that’s not actually what the pardon says.
It likely doesn’t matter for the argument, and the selective prosecution claim is likely not McIver’s strongest challenge to this indictment.
But amid James Comer’s fevered conspiracy theories about the impropriety of old man Biden’s pardons, this detail ought to get a mention.
Contrary to what the Mormon governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has said, there’s not much in the information filed against Tyler Robinson that substantiates his claim that Tyler Robinson is a lefty.
Unless there’s more evidence of partisanship elsewhere, he seems to have coded Robinson’s sexuality onto political partisanship.
It is true that he is in a romantic relationship with his transitioning roommate. That is stated explicitly in the charging documents, and Robinson calls the roommate, “love.”
I am still ok my love,
[snip]
you are all I worry about love
Here’s what Robinson told the roommate (and his parents) about his motive:
I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.
And here’s what he said about the engravings on the bullets:
remember how I was engraving bullets? The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme, if I see “notices bulge uwu” on fox new I might have a stroke alright im gonna have to leave it, that really fucking sucks. …
And that’s about it.
Utah is basing its death penalty bid on an aggravated murder charge. See Adam Klasfeld for reasons that may not stick (as several of the charges against Luigi Mangione did not, per a judge’s ruling today).
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In the first, a 22-year old man raised in a white Republican family and pickled in gaming culture shot Charlie Kirk. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who admitted he prayed that the culprit would not be a member of his Mormon culture, claims Tyler Robinson has been radicalized by left culture, but thus far the only evidence he has presented is a claim that Tyler is in a relationship with his roommate, whom Cox describes as transitioning. Kash Patel’s latest Fox hit describes a message Robinson left that appears to reference Kirk’s hatred: “some hatred cannot be negotiated with.”
An hour later and one state away, 16-year old Desmond Holly shot up Evergreen High School, putting two of his classmates in the hospital before taking his own life. The ADL describes that Holly had an account on an online gore site where he had celebrated far right shootings and seemed to speak in advance of his attack.
Holly appears to have joined the gore site on December 26, 2024, during the month window between the school shootings at Abundant Life Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, and Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee.
Groundbreaking research from ADL Center on Extremism in August 2025 revealed that Natalie Rupnow and Solomon Henderson, the perpetrators of the Madison and Nashville school shootings, also used the site. As an example, in August, a Moroccan teenager announced plans to livestream a mass stabbing and shared a manifesto on WatchPeopleDie, as well as X and 8kun.
Holly also collected tactical gear, adorned that gear with extremist symbols and posted content emulating former shooters such as Rupnow and the 1999 Columbine High School shooters. Like many attackers, Holly assembled his gear in a piecemeal fashion, drawing inspiration from the equipment used by previous mass shooters. For example, Holly posted a now-deleted TikTok video in which he modelled a tactical helmet and a gas mask; the post’s background music featured a Serbian folk song that Brenton Tarrant played while livestreaming the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings.
Underneath his post, Holly engaged with several comments in a manner that suggested he was close to committing his own attack. He liked one comment reading, “You got close to a full setup now man time to make a move 👍.” He also liked a comment reading, “Just need an gopro its gonan be cool an pov [sic],” and responded, “A GoPro, battery, ear protection, and maybe a patch.” Responding to another commenter, he wrote, “I’m planning on getting a camera instead.”
The Evergreen shooting, like the Annunciation school shooting — before which Robin Westman posted videos cheering school shooters in advance of her attack — was probably preventable.
In seemingly stream-of-consciousness videos that she posted, the assailant fixated on guns, violence and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets and what appear to be explosive devices, scrawled with antisemitic and racist language and threats against President Trump.
Or these tragic shootings would have been preventable had not the FBI reassigned key personnel to patrol the streets of DC, had not DHS put Thomas Fugate in charge of downsizing the office that used to try to prevent such things.
In response to the Kirk shooting, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller, projecting tactics that Charlie Kirk himself used (like doxing), used those tactics to claim that Democrats are part of a domestic terror movement that he promises to take out.
“It is a vast domestic terror movement,” said Miller, speaking of left-wing political organizations.
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” he added. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
It’s easy to forget given how much damage Miller has done to this country, but in addition to Wormtongue or Deputy Chief of Staff, his primary title is Homeland Security Advisor.
His job is to keep Americans, all Americans — including the two kids killed and 21 people injured at Annunciation, the two kids injured at Evergreen, as well as his beloved political ally Charlie Kirk — safe. And yet his response to a wave of violence carried out by young people radicalized online is to try to address just one shooting, and to address it in the least effective way possible, by hunting down people who had nothing to do with the Kirk killing.
I get that Miller has chosen to stoke fascism rather than grieve. I get the danger to all of this.
But Miller’s screed did something else: it said that he doesn’t care about the 8 and 10 and 16 year olds who face radicalized people with guns in their schools, he won’t do the most obvious things to address those shootings.
And that, it seems, counsels an obvious response.
Stephen Miller has announced he will do nothing to address school shootings, generally. He will do nothing to address the radicalization happening in chat rooms, including chat rooms that would be freely accessible to law enforcement if they weren’t off terrorizing Latino grandmothers.
Stephen Miller has responded to the murder of someone he calls a friend not by doing the most common sense things to try to prevent further school shootings, all school shootings, but to do the exact opposite.
And every parent of children who attend schools should be furious about Miller’s abject refusal to do his job.
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Fox News has a long article today claiming — albeit with wildly conflicting evidence — that Kash Patel’s job is in jeopardy. One of Kash’s crimes, according to the article, is firing Brian Driscoll and others in such a way that exposes Trump to have to sit for a deposition.
On the same day Kirk was shot, three former high-ranking FBI officials filed a lawsuit accusing Patel, Bondi, and their agencies of unlawfully firing them as part of a political purge directed by the DOJ and the White House – something Patel promised against in Senate confirmation hearings.
The larger concern, according to those familiar with the litigation, is Patel allegedly wielded authority belonging solely to the president, citing Article II of the Constitution in dismissal letters he signed. The misstep, they say, creates a legal minefield for the FBI, DOJ, and Executive Office of the President.
“Either way, it’s bad: Kash cannot exercise the powers of the president, and the president can’t fire these officials,” a source with direct knowledge of the lawsuit said.
The filing reads, “Article II of the Constitution and the laws of the United States do not vest any such authority with the Director of the FBI. Article II provides authority for the President, and the President alone, to appoint principal officers, concomitant with the power to remove them “at will.” None of Plaintiffs are principal officers and, more importantly, the FBI Director is not the President.”
A senior law enforcement official said, “The admin could very well lose in court, and it will be because of Kash’s big mouth, making the president look like an ass.”
I made a similar point about Kash stupidly yapping his mouth, but not about the Article II invocation. If the Article II thing were a problem, I noted, it would mean Pam Bondi would be badly exposed for firing Maurene Comey, among others, on the same basis.
Well, ask and you shall receive Maurene Comey just sued Bondi and DOJ for her firing. And indeed, Ms. Comey does cite that Article II firing in the lawsuit.
52. OPM issued a Standard Form (“SF”) 50, “Notification of Personnel Action,” to Ms. Comey shortly after her receipt of the July 16, 2025 memorandum. (Attached hereto as Exhibit B, the “SF-50,” redacted.) Section 5-D of Ms. Comey’s SF-50 is titled “Legal Authority.” This section states: ART II CONSTITUTION.
53. Section 45 of Ms. Comey’s SF-50 is titled “Remarks.” This section states: REASON(S) FOR REMOVAL: ARTICLE II OF THE CONSTITUTION.
54. The July 16 memorandum terminating Ms. Comey indicated twice that she was being “removed from federal service.” This term was not defined in the letter. However, 5 U.S.C. § 2101 defines the “civil service” as “consist[ing] of all appointive positions in the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the Government of the United States, except positions in the uniformed services.”
One of Ms. Comey’s attorneys, Margaret Donovan, is also among the attorneys representing Driscoll et al. And the lawsuit bears similarities to the FBI lawsuit. Whereas the Driscoll lawsuit focuses on former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin’s role in getting FBI agents, especially Spencer Evans, fired, this lawsuit blames Laura Loomer, dedicating at least eight paragraphs and several pages to Loomer’s interminable rants.
8. On May 18, 2025, Ms. Loomer called for Mr. Comey’s “liberal daughter” and her “Democrat husband” to be “FIRED from the DOJ immediately” “for being a national security risk via their proximity to a criminal [i.e., Mr. Comey] who just committed a felony by threatening to assassinate the President.”5 Ms. Loomer also declared that, “under [Attorney General Pamela] Blondi [sic], every Deep State Operator is being emboldened,” and she “question[ed] the impartiality of Maurene and Lucas [Maurene’s husband] in their prosecutorial roles, especially in high-profile cases, due to the undeniable bias and influence stemming from James Comey’s public criticism of Trump and the ongoing investigation into his Instagram post.”6 After Ms. Comey’s termination, Ms. Loomer boasted that the decision “c[a]me[] 2 months after my pressure campaign on Pam Blondi [sic] to fire Comey’s daughter and Comey’s son-in-law from the DOJ.”7
Ms. Comey alleges that she was fired solely for her association with her father. If this lawsuit were to survive, Ms. Comey might be able to access details of Trump’s witch hunt targeting the former FBI Director.
Of course, that allegation doesn’t match the timeline. As Loomer herself noted (even while claiming credit in a way that is very helpful to this lawsuit), Loomer’s rants were in May, two months before Ms. Comey was fired on July 16, right in the middle of Todd Blanche’s efforts to engage in a sex trafficking coverup. Ms. Comey’s firing was crucial to Blanche’s efforts to be as ignorant as possible when he conducted his so-called proffer with the convicted sexual predator. And sure enough, Ghislaine Maxwell made all sorts of statements in the proffer that obviously conflicted with the known public record.
Which is why I’m actually more interested in the references to Ms. Comey’s role on the Epstein and Maxwell prosecution teams than Loomer’s rants. Her role in the Maxwell prosecution appears throughout the complaint, most notably where she describes receiving the Director’s Award for her work on the trial (an important detail in case Todd Blanche tries to claim that poor Ghislaine Maxwell was treated poorly by Jim Comey’s daughter).
38. In addition, in May 2023, the Director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys awarded Ms. Comey and her team the prestigious Director’s Award for “Superior Performance by a Litigative Team” with respect to the Maxwell trial.
Descriptions of the Epstein and Maxwell cases appear among a long line of other cases she worked (including supervising the Robert Menendez prosecution). In these sections (and elsewhere in the complaint), Ms. Comey notes that she was closely supervised on the cases, including by Trump US Attorney Geoffrey Berman and his successor, Audrey Strauss.
32. With her significant experience prosecuting matters involving violence and sexual exploitation, her SDNY supervisors assigned Ms. Comey to work on the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein in the spring of 2019. She was part of the team that conducted grand jury proceedings and secured an indictment against Mr. Epstein for sex trafficking and conspiracy; Mr. Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019.10 Ms. Comey was one of three prosecutors who then represented the United States in Mr. Epstein’s criminal case, successfully defeating his request for bail pending trial. Mr. Epstein died in federal jail on August 10, 2019, while awaiting trial; as a result, the charges against him were ultimately dismissed. Geoffrey Berman—then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, serving in the first Trump Administration— supervised Ms. Comey’s work on the investigation and prosecution of Mr. Epstein at all times.
33. At the direction and under the supervision of SDNY leadership, Ms. Comey and her team continued to investigate Mr. Epstein’s criminal operation after Mr. Epstein died. They uncovered details that implicated Mr. Epstein’s former girlfriend and collaborator, Ghislaine Maxwell. On or about July 2, 2020, the SDNY, through Ms. Comey and her team, obtained an indictment charging Ms. Maxwell with enticing a minor to travel to engage in criminal sexual activity, transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, conspiracy to commit both of those offenses, and perjury in connection with two sworn depositions.11 Ms. Comey and her team subsequently obtained a superseding indictment additionally charging Ms. Maxwell with conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of a minor and sex trafficking of a minor.
34. At the direction and under the supervision of SDNY leadership, Ms. Comey successfully led the investigation and prosecution of Ms. Maxwell, including serving as one of the lead trial lawyers in a month-long trial, and secured justice for many victims of Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell. On December 29, 2021, a jury convicted Ms. Maxwell on five counts, including sex trafficking of a minor, conspiracy, and transportation of a minor for illegal sexual activity. Ms. Maxwell was sentenced in June 2022 to 20 years in prison for her role in the sex trafficking scheme.12 U.S Attorney Berman and later Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss— both serving in the first Trump Administration—were deeply involved in supervising the investigation and prosecution of Ms. Maxwell during their tenures.
10 See https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1180481/dl
11 See https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1291491/dl?inline
12 See https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/ghislaine-maxwell-sentenced-20-years-prisonconspiring-jeffrey-epstein-sexually-abuse
Note that Ms. Comey doesn’t describe that Epstein killed himself; she describes that he died in custody.
The complaint disclaims the import of her role in the Maxwell prosecution to explain her firing by noting that none of the other AUSAs on the prosecution team have been fired.
Nor could the explanation plausibly be that she mishandled her high-profile cases; she received accolades related to her work on some of those high-profile cases, and, on information and belief, among the at least fourteen AUSAs who participated in the prosecutions of Epstein, Maxwell, Hadden, and Combs, Ms. Comey was the only one who was terminated.
Except some of the Epstein and Maxwell prosecutors were already gone. One left at the end of the Biden Administration, at least one more was part of the Eric Adams purge.
All that said, the hypothesis that Loomer got Maurene fired because of who her father is, which has a better chance of surviving a motion to dismiss, might give DOJ a choice: explain, instead, that Todd Blanche had a sex trafficking cover-up to carry out, a cover-up which Ms. Comey’s continued presence at SDNY might threaten.
Or give Ms. Comey a whole bunch of discovery on Trump’s longtime targeting of Maurene’s father.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Ghislaine_Maxwell_MDC_mug_shot_cropped.png11991072emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-09-15 13:00:552025-09-15 13:00:55Lawsuit Alleges that Laura Loomer Illegally Got Ghislaine Maxwell’s Prosecutor Fired
