I’m used to Mike Schmidt ignoring Trump’s weaponization of DOJ against his rivals during the first term. I’m used to Devlin Barrett credulously writing down propaganda that right wing law enforcement sources tell him to write down as if it were true.
But this, from the two of them, is a remarkable exercise in disinformation in service of a weaponized investigation.
They describe that a fox is in the hen house, but are so ignorant, naive, or corrupt that they describe the fox, instead, as a guard dog.
The factual details the story describes are:
Kash Patel is investigating his claim that he found burn bags full of classified documents which, he claims, is proof people intended to destroy them (but which sources for the story explain is really dumb because any documents found in a burn bag would be on digital servers too)
Paul Abbate (who was considered a candidate to be Director of FBI after Jim Comey was fired) is a subject of the investigation
Kash put the investigation in WDVA, basing venue on a storage facility there, to avoid DC grand juries
The US Attorney for WDVA, Todd Gilbert, recently resigned shortly after being appointed
“One of the documents investigators have been asking about…was declassified in 2020, while Mr. Trump was in office”
The men describe the Durham Report as Devlin described it in 2023 when he credulously parroted Durham’s claimed findings, without mentioning how badly the report itself undermined Durham’s claims.
Mr. Durham ultimately concluded that the F.B.I.’s work on the Russia investigation suffered from “confirmation bias” against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Durham brought two separate cases to trial on charges that people lied to the F.B.I. in the course of its Russia investigation, but both trials ended in quick acquittals.
Such a description was sloppy in 2023 but is inexcusable now, in the wake of the declassification of the classified annex. The classified annex showed that by July 2021, Durham should have concluded that the premise of his entire investigation was based on documents fabricated by Russian spies to frame Hillary.
Here’s the NYT story on that, in case Devlin and NYT Mike have difficulties learning about this.
Once you understand that the classified annex disclosed that John Durham and Jack Eckenrode knowingly spent years investigating Hillary’s people based off a Russian fabrication — literally committing the crime they were investigating — then Kash’s burn bag claim would most immediately implicate Durham and his team, including Eckenrode. Durham went to great lengths to obscure that he had been chasing Russian disinformation, even in his classified annex. Such an effort bespeaks guilty conscience, the kind of guilty conscience that might lead someone to attempt to destroy evidence.
If this were a real investigation, Eckenrode would be a suspect, not the lead investigator.
Worse still, if Kash imagines (or claims to imagine) he’s found new, hard copy versions of what he himself helped declassify in 2020 — documents that included a report about the SVR documents bearing John Ratcliffe’s name (but undoubtedly written with Kash), heavily redacted notes from John Brennan, and a somewhat redacted version of the CIA version of a referral to the FBI — then the steps that Durham’s team (that is, Eckenrode) took to access those documents in 2019 and afterwards would likewise be a central focus of any credible investigation.
Indeed, the apparent fact that Durham — that is, Eckenrode — never presented an FBI version of a September 7, 2016 referral purportedly sent to the FBI, which none of the FBI witnesses remember seeing, would be a central issue in any investigation.
That referral is something that, if it exists in hard copy, if it exists at all, might present new investigative leads.
But also would raise still more questions about the criminal conduct of Eckenrode and Durham — their willing quest to chase disinformation created by Russian spies to frame Hillary Clinton.
And it would raise real questions about whether, after chasing a Russian fabrication for years, Kash’s FBI decided to start fabricating evidence themselves.
This is an investigation led by someone who should be a chief suspect. Such investigations never turn out well.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-27-at-09.09.23.png410424emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-27 05:16:362025-08-27 05:23:07Devlin Barrett and Mike Schmidt Mistake the Fox in the Henhouse for a Guard Puppy
As I’ve noted repeatedly, there should be far more attention to the fact that right wing Governors are forcing members of their National Guard to leave their homes, their families, and their jobs to avenge Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, the privileged white kid with ties to criminal hackers who allegedly got assaulted when out past 3AM one night. Most are sending their own constituents away from their homes to fight crime, allegedly, in a safer place than their own home.
And now, they’re doing so to avenge a guy accused of potential misconduct that may put their own privacy at risk.
NYT was the first to report on a new whistleblower complaint, from Social Security’s Chief Data Officer, Chuck Borges, alleging that DOGE boys created a live copy of the entire Social Security database. Specifically, the complaint alleges:
When DOGE personnel were given access to Social Security data in mid-March, they had equipment pin access (meaning actions could not be traced to one user) and write access, potentially violating laws protecting IRS data.
After Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander imposed a Temporary Restraining Order on DOGE access on March 20, DOGE almost immediately restored — and expanded — access to Social Security data, potentially exposing those who granted access to CFAA hacking charges.
After SCOTUS lifted the preliminary injunction on this data, DOGE created their own replica of SSA’s Numerical Identification System on an insecure server.
A risk assessment of recreating a live Social Security database described the catastrophic risk involved.
Developers (presumably DOGE) planned to import NUMIDENT into the cloud, and because AWS-ACI is an extension of the SSA network, any other SSA production data and PII could also be imported; “unauthorized access to the NUMIDENT would be considered catastrophic impact to SSA beneficiaries and SSA programs” [emphasis Borges’];
Since earlier this month, Borges has been trying to understand the impact of that live replica database. Those with access — including Big Balls, but also Aaram Moghaddassi, who first created the replica copies — refused to respond to his questions. What answers he did get only confirmed his concerns. And he learned the the lawyers were instructing people not to answer his questions.
That same day, in response to Mr. Borges’ August 8, 2025 request for information about concerns raised, a CIO employee confirmed that while two cloud access accounts owned by Aaram Moghaddassi were created per SSA policy, they are not managed by the Division of Infrastructure Services (DIS), are self-administered, and include access to both test and live data environments. 67 Also on August 11, 2025 in response to the same August 7, 2025 request from Mr. Borges, another CIO employee provided the July 15, 2025 PATO and the June 25, 2025 approval by Russo of the NUMIDENT data transfer.
This information, while responsive to Mr. Borges’ request for information regarding data security concerns, serves to support Mr. Borges’ reasonable belief that the creation of the DOGE specific, self-administered cloud environment lacking independent security controls and hosting a copy of NUMIDENT constitutes an abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, substantial and specific threat to public health and safety, and potentially violation of law, rule, or regulation.
Moreover, to date, Mr. Borges has not received a response to his August 7, 2025 request for information from Coristine, Solly, and Tyquiengco. Nor has he received information to indicate that the cloud environment hosting the American public’s NUMIDENT data is protected by best practice and industry standard independent security controls. This leaves Mr. Borges with the reasonable belief that the NUMIDENT data is at risk of exposure, and without information necessary to effectuate his responsibilities as CDO.
Furthermore, Mr. Borges is aware that the Office of General Counsel has advised employees not to respond to his inquiries.68 Such restriction on information to the CDO puts Mr. Borges in an untenable position inhibiting his ability to effectuate the responsibilities of his role
When Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from lifting the preliminary injunction in June, she talked about how badly the Court was skewing relative harm, granting DOGE access — including to people like Big Balls — even while privacy law protected the data.
Just last week, I wrote about the requirements for granting stay applications and, in particular, how this Court’s emergency-docket practices were decoupling from the traditional harm-reduction justification for equitable stays. See Noem, 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 5). With today’s decision, it seems as if the Court has truly lost its moorings. It interferes with the lower courts’ informed and equitable assessment of how the SSA’s data is best accessed during the course of this litigation, and it does so without any showing by the Government that it will actually suffer concrete or irreparable harm from having to comply with the District Court’s order.
[snip]
Stepping back to take a birds-eye view of the stay request before us, the Government’s failure to demonstrate harm should mean that the general equity balance tips decisively against granting a stay. See Noem, 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 4). On the one hand, there is a repository of millions of Americans’ legally protected, highly sensitive information that—if improperly handled or disseminated—risks causing significant harm, as Congress has already recognized. On the other, there is the Government’s desire to ditch the usual protocols for accessing that data, before the courts have even determined whether DOGE’s access is lawful. In the first bucket, there is also the state of federal law, which enshrines privacy protections, and the President’s constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the laws Congress has passed. This makes it not at all clear that it is in the public’s interest for the SSA to give DOGE staffers unfettered access to all Americans’ non-anonymized data before its entitlement to such access has been established, especially when the SSA’s own employees have long been subject to restrictions meant to protect the American people.
John Roberts and his Republican colleagues have granted a kid with ties to criminal hackers, Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, live access to every American’s Social Security data.
And Jeanine Pirro thinks she should look to the streets of DC to find crime.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Roberts.jpeg17051079emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-26 15:00:452025-08-27 14:27:16Amid Hunt for Crime in DC, Whistleblower Implicates Ed “Big Balls” Coristine and John Roberts
Back on Friday, before Women’s World Cup Rugby distracted me for a long weekend, I started this post with the claim, “As of this moment, both Kilmar Abrego and John Bolton are free men.”
That claim, of course, has been overtaken by events.
Friday started with a search of Bolton’s Maryland home, reportedly in a renewed investigation into the mishandling of classified information that went into his book (see Ben Wittes’ first hand account here). In an interview taped (and partially released that day), JD Vance revealed not only that he was part of the investigative decisions targeting Bolton, but effectively admitted this was a fishing expedition, basically a search of the Trump critic’s home to find out if they could target him with a crime.
VICE PRES. JD VANCE:
We’re in the very early stages of an ongoing investigation into John Bolton. I will say we’re going to let that investigation proceed. What I can tell you is that, unlike the Biden DOJ and the Biden FBI, our law enforcement agencies are going to be driven by law and not by politics. And so if we think that Ambassador Bolton has committed a crime, of course, eventually prosecutions will come. But as you know, Kristen, this is all part of gathering evidence, trying to understand something that we’re worried about. And, of course, I’ll let the FBI comment on the next stage of the investigation.
KRISTEN WELKER:
What’s at the root of this? Is this about classified documents?
VICE PRES. JD VANCE:
Well, again, I’ll let the FBI speak to that. Classified documents are certainly part of it. But I think that there’s a broad concern about, about Ambassador Bolton. They’re going to look into it. And like I said, if there’s no crime here, we’re not going to prosecute it. If there is a crime here, of course, Ambassador Bolton will get his day in court. That’s how it should be. But again, our focus here is on did he break the law? Did he commit crimes against the American people? If so, then he deserves to be prosecuted.
This was heavy handed dick-wagging, the White House making it clear they were personally directing searches of Trump’s defectors.
Meanwhile, Abrego was free on Friday when I started this post. He was released from pre-trial detention in Tennessee, only to be detained at an ICE check-in on Monday. Judge Paula Xinis has ordered the government not to deport him — to Uganda — until she can review the evidence of retaliation for his decision to contest first his illegal deportation and then the Tennessee charges against him. He has formally requested to be deported to Costa Rica.
Abrego’s very good attorney, Sean Hecker, described how much courage it took Abrego to fight this fight:
One of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, Sean Hecker, said after the detention that the threat of deportation came even as Costa Rica was willing to take him in as a refugee. “The government’s campaign of retribution continues because Mr. Abrego refuses to be coerced into pleading guilty to a case that should never have been brought,” he said.
After the Bolton search, a number of people claimed it represented some new low in Trump’s efforts to demonize his opposition. Such claims always depended on misrepresenting the Durham investigation and ignoring the way Bill Barr’s DOJ framed Joe Biden. But after the confirmation that Durham chased Russian disinformation for two more years after concluding the underlying pretext for his investigation was fabricated, such assertions border on pathology.
That said, the Kilmar Abrego treatment is new; in the first Trump term, after all, DOJ would simply reverse wrongful deportations. So, too, is Trump’s claimed firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook after Bill Pulte snooped in her mortgage records and conjured up a mortgage fraud referral. This is an Administration pushing the means by which it attempts to criminalize its opponents — but that overreach may (and in Abrego’s case, arguably already has) backfire.
I want to write a series of posts on how and what he is doing.
In this post, I will lay out a kind of topology of what he is doing — and how various executive authorities overlap in them. These attempts are efforts to push the bounds of criminal prosecution, sometimes by forgoing the actual prosecution, sometimes by fabricating evidence.
In a second post, I will discuss the players. It matters that Todd Blanche has been named in two separate vindictive prosecution filings, particularly given the ruling that Alina Habba was not properly acting as US Attorney during the period when DOJ claimed not to have body cameras for two of the key witnesses in the LaMonica McIver prosecution. It matters that Kash Patel, who harbored a grudge against Bolton going back years and included him in his enemies list, gleefully tweeted as the search of Bolton’s home began. It even matters that Pulte appears to be trawling the financial records of Trump’s enemies, even while Trump’s other policies harm the housing industry.
In a third post, I’ll consider outcomes. Trump is doing this for more than just his desire to attack his enemies. But it’s not clear whether, particularly after purging the Department of Justice of competent prosecutors, he can achieve his objectives. As I’ve noted in the past, Trump is trying to satisfy a mob of rabid conspiracy theorists. While I believe the Hunter Biden prosecution raised real concerns, in general, the criminal justice system still adheres to basic laws of gravity. And those rules may thwart Trump’s effort to redefine “justice.”
In a fourth post, I’ll review John Roberts’ opinion in Trump v. US. The opinion did more than immunize Trump’s own crimes; it created conflicts that will soon land before SCOTUS.
Immigration
It is my belief that, on top of being a raging white nationalist, Stephen Miller identified immigration law as an area where the expansiveness of Presidential authority provides ready tools for fascism. After all, Miller plotted for years to use the Alien Enemies Act as a way to send hundreds of men to a concentration camp with no due process, an effort that was thwarted (for now, at least) by the Continuing Resolution that kept government open over the weekend of March 14, Chief Judge James Boasberg’s willingness to work while on vacation, and key disclosures about the lies on which the effort was based.
From that expansive authority, DOJ has explicitly tried to criminalize support for migrants. Last week, for example, Acting Los Angeles US Attorney Bill Essayli crowed that he convinced a grand jury to indict Adrian Andrew Martinez, the kid whom CBP assaulted after he called out their detention of an old guy in his Walmart parking lot. While his indictment (from nearly a week ago) is not yet docketed, the complaint against him claims Martinez was blocking the CBP vehicles. Before charging Martinez, DOJ attempted to subpoena his contacts with media, as if the media will be implicated in this conspiracy.
The charge against Martinez — conspiracy to impede a federal officer — is the same DOJ has used against David Huerta, the President of CA’s SEIU, who also was assaulted at a protest. That case keeps getting continued, which could reflect that it is one of the cases that prosecutors are having a hard time getting a grand jury to indict, or could indicate that politicized prosecutors are using the initial charge to rifle through SEIU coffers to try to substantiate something larger.
There are four other cases where Trump’s DOJ has attempted to criminalize Democrats with a crime for countering DHS’s dragnet.
I suspect that Brad Lander, who was violently detained days before the NYC Mayoral Primary, would have been charged if not for Emil Bove’s prior statements about how even prosecuting Eric Adams was election interference.
Trump’s other key targets — Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, and Newark Congresswoman LaMonica McIver — all did have official purpose to do what Trump is trying to criminalize. But on top of that official purpose, as all three cases moved to discovery, the accused caught the government in apparent false claims. Dugan, for example, claims that DOJ falsely accused her of sending the undocumented man before her down a stairwell (the more damning alleged facts in the case against Judge Shelly Joseph, whom Trump charged in his first term).
2 On this small detail, Judge Dugan follows the government on one of its forays outside the scope of the indictment. It is undisputed—and indisputable, given the video evidence—that E.F.R. entered the public hallway about 15 feet to the right of the usual courtroom door, where two agents watched him emerge. So Judge Dugan never “optimized” the man’s avoidance of federal agents. Contra Dkt. 46 at 28. On the government’s own witness statements, she certainly never directed E.F.R. “to access a stairwell.” Dkt. 46 at 21. To the contrary, she pointed him to the public hallway. None of this is dispositive now, one way or the other, especially because the magistrate judge found these acts part of a judge’s job, Dkt. 43 at 30, and the government does not dispute that finding. But it begs the question why the government overstates or misstates its evidence.
In the Baraka and McIver case, the sworn affidavit of Ricky Patel in the Baraka case does not match the alleged facts in the McIver indictment — and that’s before you get into the missing Body Cam footage in McIver’s case.
Which is to say that Trump’s DOJ is having to make shit up in their quest to criminalize oversight for immigration enforcement.
Revenge
The criminal case against Ksenia Petrova — the Harvard researcher first detained, then arrested, for bringing frog samples into the country — is unclear. Speedy Trial should have expired on that case.
With Abrego, of course, is it much more clear. Rather than move Abrego back to the US and initiate a deportation procedure to a third country, they instead immunized and freed people who’ve committed the crime they’re alleging against Abrego. Two judges reviewed the evidence and both found it so flimsy that it didn’t merit detention. Then, after he accused the government of classic vindictive prosecution — the filing of charges because he availed himself of his rights under the Constitution, they tried to coerce him to plead guilty in order to win deportation to Costa Rica instead of Uganda.
That’s why the stakes on Abrego’s case are so high. He is challenging the government’s bid to ratchet up legal jeopardy when anyone fights for their rights. While so many others lay low in hopes they’ll avoid further targeting, Abrego — perhaps out of necessity — has pushed to vindicate rule of law.
Data dives
Meanwhile the head of Fannie and Freddie, Bill Pulte, appears to be trawling through mortgage records to find dodgy paperwork to refer to Trump’s Director of Weaponization, Eagle Ed Martin. Thus far, Pulte has referred Tish James, Adam Schiff, Lisa Cook, and two more unnamed people.
As Abbe Lowell noted in a latter to Martin regarding his stalking of Attorney General James, somehow Pulte missed that Ken Paxton has one more “primary residence” than Pulte claims that his Dem targets do.
This conclusion is supported by your other appointed title, Special Attorney.Whileprofessing to be acting to address “mortgage fraud,” Attorney General Bondi and you have statedthat your targets are Ms. James (Democratic Attorney General of New York) and Adam Schiff(Democratic Senator of California).Notably, absent from your mandate is Kenneth Paxton(Republican Attorney General of Texas). Given that the same news reports raising questions aboutMs. James and Mr. Schiff have reported that, somehow, Mr. Paxton has three different properties that he claims to be his “primary residence,”3it seems to indicate your title ought really be,“Special Assistant for Mortgage Fraud [Alleged Against Democrats Adverse to President Trump].”
3 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Senate hopeful, claimed 3 homes as his primary residence,Associated Press (July 24, 2025), https://apnews.com/article/paxton-mortgages-trump-primary-residence-homestead-deduction-bd259b6bd122afcaf4f11eac5a3a152e.
One thing that’s missing from all of this, however, is that Ed Martin is the one receiving these referrals, not a competent prosecutor (note, too, that the metadata of an earlier letter Martin sent Lowell showed that Jared Wise, an FBI agent who incited January 6 rioters to kill cops, was the author of the letter).
These are men who stated their job was to name and shame, not prosecute.
Ed Martin described himself at a press conference as the “captain” of the group that is investigating prosecutors who launched past investigations into Trump and his allies.
“There are some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them,” Martin said. “And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed. And that’s a fact. That’s the way things work. And so that’s, that’s how I believe the job operates.”
[snip]
“I will say that the prosecutor’s role, and at this moment in our history, is to make clear what the truth is and to get that out,” Martin said. “It can’t be that the system is stifling the truth from coming out because of some procedure.”
Martin said he would have a “more public-facing” role as director of the Weaponization Working Group.
“When I was asked to switch over here, I was told, you know, this job, you need to be out more and talk about what’s going on. So I think we’ll be a little bit more outward facing in terms of talking about what’s happening,” Martin said.
Trump has now claimed to have fired Cook — in spite of a recent Supreme Court ruling that explicitly said the President can only fire Governors for cause, even though Pulte chose to share the referral with someone who brags that he is not conducting himself according to DOJ guidelines.
The extralegal nature of this is of particular concern. In a matter of ten days, a partisan official offered up a Black woman to target, and Trump responded by firing her without the due process he was afforded.
And I expect that Pulte is just the tip of what will soon become an iceberg. Trump has done completely unprecedented consolidation of government-held data (indeed, there’s a new allegation that DOGE is mishandling Social Security data). So we should expect more such attempts to criminalize Trump’s adversaries as his minions data mine more data.
Counter-investigation
Meanwhile, Trump is trying to find a way to claim those who investigated him are themselves criminals.
To be sure, he has already gutted DOJ and FBI of experience by purging those who worked on Trump’s cases (which by purging the really talented prosecutors, might make it harder to succeed with other edge cases DOJ is pursuing).
But Eagle Ed Martin claims to be search for a way to prosecute Tish James. There are hints that DOJ is trying to pursue people like Liz Cheney.
And rather than concerning himself with Trump’s coddling of Russian and China, Tom Cotton referred Jack Smith to Office of Special Counsel for investigation. According to a NYT report, OSC has not contacted Smith or his team at all (suggesting that under Trade Rep Jamieson Greer, the office is not working according to normal protocol). This may be just another attempt to document dive — beyond what Trump himself attempted — to try to invent conflicts where none exists.
Conspiracy theories
Then there’s the at least third attempt to do what John Durham spent four years attempting to do, but failed — to find some way to claim that the counterintelligence and criminal investigation of Trump in 2016 was itself criminal.
The latest incarnation stems from Tulsi Gabbard’s adoption of an obvious conspiracy theory, one based on provably false claims about the shift in the intelligence review in 2016, the content of the Intelligence Community Assessment, and John Clapper’s view of the Steele dossier briefing to Trump.
And then finally there’s the old news — the attempt to mine from prosecution declinations — of Jim Comey under Bill Barr in 2020 and of John Bolton under Merrick Garland sometime in the last four years. Both these investigations attempt to criminalize the men for the same thing Trump was himself charged with: mishandling classified information. They aspire to do so with declination decisions from past prosecutors.
Security clearance
The second area in which Trump is exploiting expansive Executive authority is in security clearances. He started his term by stripping security clearance from any of the 51 spooks who truthfully said that the Hunter Biden hard drive packaged as a laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation. A move to strip the security clearance of anyone in the Big Law firms he targeted is the one aspect of those Executive Orders that might survive on appeal (Trump has appealed all those decisions, on delayed basis). There were select cases of targeting — perhaps most importantly, Mark Zaid, since Zaid is one of the defense attorneys with most experience adjudicating clearance issues. And then in recent weeks, Tulsi started stripping the clearance of top spies based on her conspiracy theories.
The expansiveness of Presidential power on this issue will matter in criminal cases insofar as it prevents someone like John Bolton from enjoining the witch hunt into him.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-26-at-4.21.41-PM.png450448emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-08-26 12:03:532025-08-26 12:10:00Two Maryland Men and a Michigan Woman: A Topology Trump’s Witch Hunts
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.
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.
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.
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 includedno 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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 DirectorAdmiral Michael Rogers.347The President expressed frustration with the Russia investigation, saying that it made relations with the Russiansdifficult.348The 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 himwith Russia were not true and asked Rogers if he could do anything to refute the stories.350Deputy Directorof the NSA Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, said it wasthemost unusual thing he had experienced in 40 years of government service.351After the call concluded, Ledgett prepared amemorandumthat he and Rogers both signed documenting the content of the conversation and the President’s request, and they placed the memorandumin a safe.352But Rogers did not perceive the President’s request to be an order, and the President did not ask Rogers topush 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
347Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 3-4.
348Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.
349Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 1-2;seeRogers 6/12/17 302,at 4.
350Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4-5; Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.
351Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2.
352Ledgett 6/13/17 302, at 2-3; Rogers 6/12/17 302, at 4.
353Rogers 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:
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
“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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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