I’ve written several times (one, two, three) about the possibility that Maurene Comey’s wrongful termination lawsuit might provide transparency on DOJ’s larger weaponization against people like her father.

But (aside from vindication for Ms. Comey), I always conceived it in terms of the specific disclosures it might bring. Because she claims she was fired because of Trump’s gripes about her father, if the lawsuit survives motion to dismiss, Ms. Comey might well get more details of how Trump installed his Insurance Lawyer just in time to try to prosecute her father. (Indeed, Judge Jesse Furman, who presides over this case, suggested in an order he might grant Ms. Comey discovery before the motion to dismiss.)

A filing submitted in advance of a hearing scheduled for tomorrow reveals it may be more than that.

As part of a discussion in defense of suing now, before Merit Systems Protection Board adjudicates her case, Ms. Comey revealed a lot of what has been going on at MSPB, which normally would review Civil Service violations like her firing.

It starts by arguing that MSPB cannot adjudicate novel legal issues, such as whether the President can unilaterally ignore the Civil Service Reform Act.

[T]he MSPB lacks expertise to adjudicate this novel dispute: whether, as the government will likely argue, Article II of the Constitution overrides a federal employee’s rights under the Civil Service Reform Act (“CSRA”) and the Bill of Rights. See, e.g., Jackler v. DOJ, MSPB DA-0752-25-0330-I-1, DOJ submission, available at: https://washingtonlitigationgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Jackler-Motion.pdf. Because this case raises foundational constitutional questions with respect to the separation of powers, the MSPB is not the appropriate forum for this dispute. See Axon Enterprise Inc. v. Federal Trade Commission, 598 U.S. 175, 195-96 (2023) (district court retains jurisdiction over “collateral” claims “outside the [agency’s] sphere of expertise”); Thunder Basin Coal Co. v. Reich, 510 U.S. 200, 212, 214-215 (1994) (claims not of type Congress intended to be reviewed within statutory structure if “wholly collateral” to statute’s review provisions and “agency expertise” not “brought to bear on the statutory questions presented”) (cleaned up).

Then, it notes that all the legal precedents requiring people with termination complaints to first go through MSPB process are predicated on the MSPB being independent of the President.

Second, the Supreme Court decisions that outline the MSPB’s jurisdiction presumed an MSPB that functioned independently of the President, which is no longer true. The “CSRA’s adjudicatory scheme was predicated on the existence of a functioning and independent MSPB,” See Nat’l Ass’n of Immigr. Judges v. Owen, 139 F.4th 293, 304 (4th Cir. 2025) (rejecting channeling to MSPB because “Congress enacted the CSRA on the bedrock principle that the members of the MSPB and the Special Counsel would be protected from removal on political grounds, providing them independence from the President”). However, the President has pronounced that independent agencies must follow his interpretation of the law. See Exec. Order 14215 (Feb. 18, 2025) §§ 1, 2(b), 5, 7 (directing that the President and the Attorney General “shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch,” and their “opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees”—including on “so-called independent agencies”; “No employee of the executive branch… may advance an interpretation of the law… that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law”).2 Further, the President terminated the sole Democratic member of the MSPB Board and insists he has the unlimited right to do so,

Then, it noted that in the days after Ms. Comey wrote this in her complaint (Ms. Comey is represented by Margaret Donovan, who is handling several other Article II and other politicized firings) …

As of September 1, 2025, 891 PFRs are pending.47 Finally, on information and belief, in recent cases, the Government itself has argued before the MSPB that the CSRA is unconstitutional because it violates the President’s alleged Article II prerogatives, and that the MSPB has no jurisdiction over a challenge to an Article II removal. The MSPB, for its part, has previously ruled that it does not have the authority to adjudicate the constitutionality of statutes. 48 On information and belief, the MSPB is currently treating agencies’ Article II-based challenges to its authority consistent with this precedent, which is to say, it is declining to rule on the issue.

… The Office of Legal Counsel all of a sudden decided that the MSPB, and not Article III courts, should decide constitutional matters.

Indeed, the MSPB itself has repeatedly concluded that it lacks authority to adjudicate such sweeping constitutional questions, see Malone v. DOJ, 14 M.S.P.R. 403, 406 (1983), and until two months ago, so did the government, as discussed below, see Dkt. 1 ¶ 84.

[snip]

[A]nd the Department of Justice recently and suddenly reversed its position and now insists that the MSPB must review constitutional issues, compare Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, Slip Opinion, 49 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 26, 2025), to, e.g., Dkt. 1 ¶ 84 (alleging that the government argued, before September 15, 2025, that MSPB has no jurisdiction over a challenge to an Article II removal). The OLC’s reversal came immediately after an MSPB administrative judge declined to rule on the constitutionality of Article II removals; that issue is now on appeal to the very Board that the President has ordered must adhere to his interpretation of law. This is a thorough evisceration of the MSPB’s independence. As a matter of due process and constitutional principle, the President’s decision to remove a career civil servant without cause, in violation of Congress’s explicit prohibition, cannot fairly be adjudicated by an agency that is subservient to that same President.

Then it reveals that MSPB has been dismissing cases, like hers, challenging her firing on Article II authority until it decides whether the President’s Article II authority can override civil service protections, which is where Kafka gets invoked.

Third, any MSPB proceeding would be futile. On November 25, 2025, an MSPB administrative judge notified Ms. Comey that the MSPB intends to dismiss her appeal without prejudice, while awaiting a ruling from the Board (now beholden to the President) about whether the President’s Article II power overrides the CSRA. Today, the government consented to that dismissal. To the best of our knowledge, Ms. Comey is not alone. Since November 17, 2025, MSPB administrative judges have dismissed without prejudice multiple MSPB appeals of “Article II” firings, and the government has acquiesced in each case. See, e.g., Law360, “Ex-US Trustee Director’s Firing Appeal Tossed, For Now,” November 21, 2025 (citing Tara Twomey v. DOJ, MSPB DC-0752-25-1950-I-1). This procedure is Kafkaesque: the Executive Branch maintains it can fire Ms. Comey without the due process afforded by the CSRA, yet insists that she submit adjudication of that question to the body created by the CSRA, all while advocating for the premature termination of the CSRA process. Meanwhile, the Executive Branch contends it can dictate the outcome of her appeal (should it eventually proceed) by controlling the “authoritative interpretations of the law” and removing any decisionmaker who dares to disagree. This scheme has been transformed into a dead end that provides no due process. See Carr v. Saul, 593 U.S. 83, 93 (2021) (“It makes little sense to require litigants to present claims to adjudicators who are powerless to grant the relief requested.”). It is not what Congress intended. See Axon Enterprise, 598 U.S. at 191 (plaintiffs need not submit to administrative process where they would face “an illegitmate proceeding, led by an illegitmate decisionmaker,” because “being subjected to such an illegitmate proceeding causes legal injury” that “cannot be undone”); Thunder Basin, 510 U.S. at 212 (Congress did not intend to preclude district court jurisdiction where statutory scheme “forecloses all meaningful judicial review”). [my emphasis]

Thus far, Ms. Comey has not mentioned that John Sarcone, the only one willing to defend against this lawsuit, is playacting at being US Attorney just like Lindsey Halligan is or was.

Just to add to the abuse of power going on here.

It all sounds like the kind of case that could be headed for SCOTUS.

For now, Ms. Comey has more modest goals, like figuring out whether the President personally fired her, or whether some flunky (or former Defense Attorney) at DOJ did it for him.

First, initial discovery can be narrowly tailored, if necessary, to critical questions relating to the circumstances of Ms. Comey’s termination, including who made the decision and on what basis.

[snip]

For example, if the President terminated Ms. Comey, then the question before the Court is whether the President’s Article II powers supersede Congress’s Article I powers and the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, if, as the White House claims (Dkt. 1 ¶ 51), someone within the Department of Justice terminated Ms. Comey, then the Court must decide the additional question of the extent to which the President can delegate his alleged Article II power to supersede Article I.

Of course, even that detail may intertwine with her father’s potentially ongoing persecution.

Twenty-eight paragraphs into the story that first focused attention on the murder Pete Hegseth ordered back in September (though as it notes, Nick Turse first revealed the second shot just days after the attack) is this revelation: it took four strikes to kill first the people then destroy any debris from the targeted boats.

The boat in the first strike was hit a total of four times, twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it, four people familiar with the operation said.

It took the most powerful military in the history of the world four shots the get the job done.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

That fact lies at the core of a whole bunch of other senselessness about Trump’s feckless rule. There’s Trump’s release of Juan Orlando Hernández, a proven high-level threat, even as forces that normally prevent turbulence in the Middle East gather off of Venezuela’s oil fields. There’s the many ways, starting with the destruction of USAID and definitely including Trump’s trade war, that has added to global instability. There’s the cost involved in drone-striking small boats. There’s the neutering of legal advisors who might have saved Admiral Frank Bradley from being underbussed by the guy who promoted him. There’s the pretend press corps filled with nutballs and cranks that ensures that Whiskey Pete will never be challenged with actual knowledge.

But at root, you’ve got Pete Hegseth sitting atop that most powerful military boom boom boom boom, treating it like a children’s game.

And he doesn’t realize that on this, his first attempt, and twice more after that, the most powerful military in the history of the world could not take out an unarmed boat in uncontested waters with one shot.

Donald Trump thinks murderboats make him look strong (though the video he released of this one hid that it took four shots to get the job done).

Pete Hegseth thinks murderboats make him look strong.

But holy hell, can we talk about how feckless the reality is?

Update: This timeline of the conflicting things Trump and his minions have said about the September 2 strike is useful.

There are a number of articles (Reuters, Politico) describing discussions about reindicting Jim Comey and Letitia James. Neither addresses the issue I lay out here — namely, that the ultimate goal of the Comey prosecution, at least, is to support the Grand Conspiracy in Florida, perhaps by obtaining at least probable cause that Comey lied to cover up the import of (Grand Conspiracy nutballs claim to believe) the “Clinton Plan” CIOL and Comey’s decision to release a memo documenting Trump’s corruption.

More importantly, neither addresses a new wrinkle: That Dan Richman wants his data back. (Anna Bower first noted the suit.)

Last Wednesday, Richman moved under Rule 41(g) to get his property, in the form of an image of his computer made by the Inspector General, as well as emails and additional content obtained derivative to that.

While there are redacted bits describing the original imaging by DOJ IG of the computer and the overcollection at that stage (as well as the warrants themselves, which would have been unsealed by now if the indictment hadn’t been dismissed), it relies heavily on and largely tracks William Fitzpatrick’s ruling effectively cataloging the many Fourth Amendment violations involved in the searches of Richman’s data, which Richman points to in order to claim that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly need not consider the normal balancing considerations.

While the government may argue that it needs the Hard Drive to obtain evidence to prosecute Mr. Comey, the Comey case has now been dismissed and any charges related to the underlying conduct are time-barred. [citation omitted] (noting that had Mr. Comey not been indicted, the statute of limitations would have expired on September 30, 2025). Even if the case were to somehow proceed, the government should be barred from using evidence from the Hard Drive. The materials from the Hard Drive that the government presented to the grand jury in the Comey case were only identified by the government because it (1) exceeded the scope of the Warrants and seized non-responsive data, (2) illegally retained materials it should have destroyed or returned, and (3) searched the illegally seized and retained data without a warrant.

As Comey was preparing to move to suppress this content, the Loaner AUSAs claimed that he had no Fourth Amendment interest in Richman’s data. That was contestable for at least a subset of the data. But Richman clearly has a Fourth Amendment interest in it.

If this effort by Richman is successful, in particular his request for “a temporary restraining order enjoining the government from using or relying on in any way the improperly seized materials until such time as the Court can further consider the merits of his claims,” all the data would become inaccessible, both for any reindictment of the false statements indictment or for the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy.

Oh sure, the FBI could attempt to obtain new warrants — or subpoena Richman for the same material. But much of their use of this data (Exhibits 8, 9, and 10 post-dated Richman’s departure from the FBI, and Exhibits 3 through 7 involved sourcing for which Richman was public) did not fit basic criteria arising from the imagined crimes, Richman leaking information while still at FBI. Of what the Loaner AUSAs presented to the grand jury, they’d be stuck with the “Clinton CIOL” that the jury no-billed.

• Exhibit 1: DOJ IG Investigation into Comey’s Memos
• Exhibit 2: Comey letter reopening investigation
• Exhibit 3: January 2, 2015: Letter stating that Richman would not comment on matters he “work[s] on for the Bureau”[1st Columbia email]
• Exhibit 4: October 29, 2016: Text saying, “The country can’t seem to handle your finding stuff” [2nd Columbia email]
• Exhibit 5: October 30, 2016: Richman offering to write an op-ed for NYT [2nd Columbia email]
• Exhibit 6: November 1-2, 2016: Comey suggests perhaps Richman can make Mike Schmidt smarter [2nd Columbia email]
• Exhibit 7: November 2, 2016: Richman noting story about Hillary [2nd Columbia email]
• Exhibit 8: April 23, 2017: Email to Richman thanking him [Columbia email]
• Exhibit 9: February 11, 2017: Richman recruiting Chuck Rosenberg for article [1st Columbia email]
• Exhibit 10: May 2017: Texts between Schmidt and Richman [Dan Richman’s phone]
• Exhibit 11: DOJ IG Investigation into Comey’s Memos
• Exhibit 12: July, 27, 2025: 18 USC 2071 Opening memo
• Exhibit 13: September 26, 2016: Notes on Russian investigation briefing
• Exhibit 14: Transcript of Lindsey Graham question about the CIOL

And to get the files they really want — Exhibit 10 — the FBI would undoubtedly rely on the tainted searches Richman invokes here to justify demanding the return of his data. Plus, there’s a chunk of data DOJ unlawfully seized that went through 2019; if DOJ found anything enticing in there, it too would become inaccessible.

Kash Patel’s FBI fucked up pretty badly in the way they searched Richman’s data for dirt on Jim Comey. The dismissal of the indictment might have otherwise shielded them from consequences. But at the very least this effort may thwart their ongoing witch hunt targeting Comey.

I think the trajectory of the last few weeks has been lost in the serial disclosures, so I want to summarize them here.

Mark Kelly and five other Democrats made a video reminding service members they can refuse illegal orders

On November 18, Elissa Slotkin released a video in which she and five other former military or intelligence officers — Mark Kelly, Chris DeLuzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, and Jason Crow — reminding that they can refuse illegal orders.

One of the tactics Republicans chose to use in response was to demand that the members of Congress describe what illegal orders had been given.

An even stupider tactic was to move to prosecute the six, in Kelly’s case (because his retirement makes him susceptible to such a thing), threatening to withdrawn him from retirement to courtmartial him.

Trump and Pete Hegseth chose to give Kelly, a genuine hero, likely presidential candidate, and far more of a man than either of them, a bigger platform and fundraising draw.

WaPo publishes the first double tap story

The video from the six Democrats was likely focused on orders to target Americans, not Venezuelans (or Colombians or Trinis, all of whom have been targeted in the murderboat strikes); it specifically describes that the Trump Administration is pitting the military and intelligence community against American citizens.

But then WaPo described Pete Hegseth — verbally — giving the quintessential illegal order.

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

The initial response to this was the same tactic that has gotten Trump where he is: to attack the press, claiming it was fake.

Trump promises to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, destroying pretext for war

Meanwhile, Trump totally undercut the premise behind over a year of targeting Venezuela.

There were always problems with Trump’s pretense for the murderboats and planned Venezuelan invasion, which is that Venezuela’s government leads a cartel of narcotraffickers that amounts to an invasion of the United States.

At first, Stephen Miller’s bullshit about Venezuela was rooted in false claims about Tren de Aragua. Perhaps because the Intelligence Community publicly debunked those claims (but not before Miller relied on his bullshit to send 200 mostly-innocent men to a concentration camp, where they were tortured), Miller moved onto a new predicate. Nicolás Maduro wasn’t in charge of Tren de Aragua, Miller decided; he was in charge of Cartel de los Soles.

Tren de Aragua at least exists, albeit not in anywhere near the numbers of slumlord residents as Miller has claimed. It’s not at all clear CdlS does. Plus, if it does exist, it traffics in cocaine, not fentanyl, the claimed invading drug that justifies treating drug trafficking as war (almost no right wing Senators understand this problem, which would be hilarious if it weren’t about to become the new Yellowcake).

But then Trump promised to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who actually did what Trump claims Maduro is doing, who was convicted of it, who was sentenced to decades in prison.

You cannot credibly claim to give a fuck about drug trafficking when you’re freeing major traffickers. I mean, Trump doesn’t care, but the men and women risk their lives and their liberty have to attend to the likelihood they’ll be left holding the bag for Trump’s crimes.

White House concedes the double tap but defends Hegseth

Then, as Congress — led by Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker — begins to investigate the operation, demanding the full video of the strike and testimony from those involved, and as legal experts made it clear that this was not just a war crime, but murder, the White House changed tack. Trump knew nothing, wouldn’t have wanted it to happen, but in fact it did happen but Pete Hegseth didn’t give the order.

While NYT was publishing a story laundering Hegseth’s claims (that he did not specifically order the murder), WaPo was back with quotes from service members recognizing that Hegseth had begun underbussing his subordinates, especially Admiral Frank Bradley.

“This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls—,” one military official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, told The Post.

Leavitt’s statement “left it up to interpretation” who was responsible for the second strike that killed the two survivors, a separate military official said, imploring the White House to provide clarity on the issue.

One official said of Leavitt’s statement, “It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus.” Another person said some of Hegseth’s top civilian staff appeared deeply alarmed about the revelations and were contemplating whether to leave the administration.

Hegseth, writing on social media Monday night, said he stands by the admiral “and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.” His statement is likely to deepen the sense of furor among military officials who suspect Hegseth is attempting to insulate himself from any legal recourse and leave Bradley — whom the secretary called “an American hero, a true professional” — to account for the fallout alone.

Whiskey Pete even posted a tweet claiming to have Bradley’s back while emphasizing that Bradley made the decision.

CIA’s disavowal of Rahmanullah Lakanwal

This comes amid several reports that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the accused killer of two National Guard members last week, had done terrible things for the CIA, but then was abandoned by John Ratcliffe’s CIA before declining into bouts of depression in advance of the attack.

The struggles to start over, leave the war behind, and find work were ever present. Lakanwal was fired from his job at a laundromat because he lacked a work authorization card despite being approved for asylum and authorized to work by the Trump administration, according to his former unit mate, who fought alongside him for more than a decade.

[snip]

About a month ago, Lakanwal told his unit mate that his inability to work due to missing immigration paperwork meant his family couldn’t afford rent or food. He resorted to borrowing money from friends and former unit members, and during the conversation, he broke down in tears from frustration and desperation, his unit mate said.

“Every time, like looking [for] somebody [to] help for documents, somebody [to] help for pay the rent, he’s not going to work,” the Afghan unit mate said.

His unit mate said Lakanwal sought help in June from a CIA program designed to aid Zero Unit veterans with immigration issues. Rolling Stone reviewed a screenshot of the group chat in June where Zero Unit veterans shared information with a CIA representative about ongoing issues. Lakanwal posted messages asking for help. His last post went unanswered and was deleted by the chat’s administrator.

None of this excuses the killing. It just makes clear that Lakanwal is one of thousands of men damaged by America’s war on terror who needs — in this case, needed — help before something terrible happens. Nigel Edge, the former Marine sniper who shot up a club from his boat in Cape Fear in September, is another one.

Mark Kelly models leadership

Meanwhile, precisely because Trump and Hegseth chose to attack Kelly, he was able to stage a press conference for little other reason than to attack Trump and Hegseth’s leadership failures.

That included addressing the double tap, in which he mostly deferred to investigations, but still upheld the import of international law.

We don’t know how all this will end.

What we do know is that, in advance of a likely demand that service members do something patently illegal, Pete Hegseth has made it clear he’ll sacrifice everyone to save himself.

As you read the 100 page report about what a shitshow the FBI is under Kash Patel, keep the following in mind.

First, this report is an attack on Kash from the right, complaining among other things, that he hasn’t eradicated “Trump Derangement Syndrome” from the FBI and that Fox doesn’t play in FBI break rooms, while applauding him for eliminating DEI.

It was shared first with Miranda Devine, whose skillset is hit jobs, not government analysis.

It was shared as a Sribd.

It was sent to Chuck Grassley and Jim Jordan, but not their counterparts Dick Durbin and Jamie Raskin.

Yes, the report’s most damning anecdote describes that Kash delayed a presser in theTyler Robinson case until he could get a ladies’ sized jacket with the particular SWAG he wanted. Yes, it describes multiple sources quoting Dan Bongino saying, “the truth is for chumps.”

There’s even the very serious and persistent concern that the FBI has neglected its counterintelligence and counterterrorism mission (the report doesn’t mention rampant public corruption).

Perhaps the most telling detail, though, is there’s no mention of Andrew Bailey, ostensibly co-Deputy with Dan Bongino.

You see, in just two weeks, Bailey will be eligible to run the FBI or even DOJ without undergoing confirmation. And so you should expect that sometime after that, someone will be replaced.

Kash has long been the leading candidate to be replaced. But there’s likely to be a bit of a Hunger Games competition in the weeks ahead as various contestants attempt to keep their high flying planes.

In the first appellate court decision on Donald Trump’s persistent effort to put Insurance Lawyers, Election Deniers, and other sundry actors play-acting as US Attorneys, the Third Circuit has unanimously ruled that Alina Habba really is nothing more than a Parking Garage lawyer.

Habba is not the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey by virtue of her appointment as First Assistant U.S. Attorney because only the first assistant in place at the time the vacancy arises automatically assumes the functions and duties of the office under the FVRA. Additionally, because Habba was nominated for the vacant U.S. Attorney position, the FVRA’s nomination bar prevents her from assuming the role of Acting U.S. Attorney. Finally, the Attorney General’s delegation of all the powers of a U.S. Attorney to Habba is prohibited by the FVRA’s exclusivity provision. Therefore, we will affirm the District Court’s disqualification order.

This ruling, if applied elsewhere, would cause problems for Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer, Sigal the Election Denying Laywer, and Bill the Chapman Nut, as well — including Essayli, whom a judge ruled could act as First AUSA.

Abbe Lowell, who represents Letitia James in EDVA, argued this case before the court.

The Third Circuit ruling comes even as the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Alina the Parking Garage lawyer is not only just a Parking Garage lawyer, but a frivolous one at that, sustaining the $1 million in fees on her and her liege Donald Trump.

Something funny is happening over at Xitter.

Yesterday, NYT published a 3,000-word profile of David Sacks describing how his installment as the White House AI and crypto czar has led to a number of decisions that may not benefit the US, such as sharing AI technology with UAE in seeming exchange for personal gain for others, including Trump. The profile quotes Sacks’ own spokesperson explaining that poor David Sacks just “wants the entire American tech stack to win.”

It also quotes Steve Bannon, which might hint at where the article came from, warning of the “road to perdition”!

Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and a critic of Silicon Valley billionaires, said Mr. Sacks was a quintessential example of ethical conflicts in an administration where “the tech bros are out of control.”

“They are leading the White House down the road to perdition with this ascendant technocratic oligarchy,” he said.

In general, the article is a bit of a squish. As one critical example, it doesn’t mention Sacks’ role in fueling a run on Silicon Valley Bank only to whine and whine and whine until Sleepy Joe Biden bailed out the billionaires, the most significant lesson to explain Sacks’ installation.

The closing paragraphs nod to the significance of all this: that at a time when both crypto and AI need a bailout — a vastly bigger bailout than SVB needed — David Sacks is there to ensure that gets prioritized over real America.

In the keynote speech, Mr. Trump described Mr. Sacks as “great” before signing executive orders to speed the building of data centers and exports of A.I systems.

Then he handed Mr. Sacks the presidential pen.

The tech bros need a bailout and Sacks is there to deliver it to them.

But NYT doesn’t lay out the stakes. If this was a Bannon-attempted hit job, it missed its mark.

Or so I thought until I watched the Xitter response to Sacks’ whiny 1,500-word complaint about how he lawyered the article, to which he attached a much longer letter from defamation lawyers.

In response, every one of the loathesome crypto and AI bros whose installation Sacks served piped up to describe what a hero poor beleaguered David Sacks is.

Mark Andreessen who of course hosts or hosted a private chat of tech bros talking up other tech bros, may have kicked it off with his claim that Sacks was performing some kind of noble citizenship, which Daddy then picked up.

Marc Benioff seconded Gavin Baker’s tautology even while treating AI bros as “builders.”

David Marcus described tech bros’ efforts to collapse dollar hegemony in glowing terms while scoffing at “incompetent technocrats.”

Zach Witkoff — the man facilitating corrupt foreign investment in precisely these technologies — hailed Sacks’ role in “helping advance the ball forward on AI and Crypto.”

Martin Shkreli, who misspelled Sacks’ name, nevertheless insisted this is the kind of guy Americans want selling away American power.

And they all tagged Sacks and he RTed them (well, except for Shkreli) and all these billionaire tech bros were performing a circle jerk for the benefit of the foreign trolls their host has installed, as if that performance itself could affirm the value of all this tech brobery to real Americans.

None of this exposes the real underlying problem here, the degree to which the American economy has been hollowed out so these bro boys can attempt to divorce themselves from the physical reality of real people entirely.

But it performs it.

In the last few days, we’ve got allegations of murder against two men who worked in counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Whiskey Pete Hegseth and Rahmanullah Lakanwal.

We don’t yet know why Lakanwal drove from Bellingham, WA, across the country, to allegedly ambush two members of the West Virginia National Guard, Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe. Spencer Ackerman noted that if Lakanwal came to the US committed to terrorism, he learned that commitment — and a great deal of military skills — from Americans.

[T]he most sobering fact about Wednesday’s slayings is that the alleged killer, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was all too compatible with Western Civilization.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued an extraordinary statement revealing that the 29-year-old Lakanwal was a “member of a partner force in Kandahar.” While a knowledgeable source with deep experience in Afghanistan cautions that the US sponsored a variety of proxy forces in southern Afghanistan, much additional reporting has identified Lakanwal as a member of the Zero Units, death squads used by the CIA during the US’s longest overseas war.

In other words, contrary to Miller and Trump, Lakanwal’s shooting spree is not the result of importing Afghan culture to America. While much will surely be revealed in Lakanwal’s upcoming trial, it looks more like the result of importing American culture to Afghanistan. The realities of blowback – the violence America experiences as the unintended consequences of the violence of US foreign policy – are what the US needs to examine in the wake of this horrifying murder if it expects to prevent the next one.

But even Ackerman doesn’t consider the possibility that something happened since — quite possibly in the last year, as Trump keeps dicking around allies of all sorts who’ve helped the United States in the past — that led Lakanwal to drive across the country only to target members of the Guard who had been uprooted from their homes to avenge Ed “Big Balls” Coristine.

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?

Contrary to what Trump and his propagandists keep squealing, Lakanwal was vetted over and over again.

The Afghan national accused of shooting two National Guard members near the White House this week underwent thorough vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the United States, according to people with direct knowledge of the case.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, arrived in the U.S. through Operation Allies Welcome (OAW), a Biden-era program that helped resettle Afghan nationals after the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

[snip]

A key question from critics has been whether any evacuees managed to enter the U.S. without proper vetting. Lakanwal, however, would not have been among them, according to the individuals, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. One of the individuals said Lakanwal was vetted years ago, before working with the CIA in Afghanistan, and then again before he arrived in the U.S. in 2021. Those examinations involved both the National Counterterrorism Center as well as the CIA, the person said.

Lakanwal was also granted asylum earlier this year, a process that would have brought its own scrutiny, according to #AfghanEvac, a coalition that supported the relocation effort — an assertion the White House did not dispute.

But no amount of vetting can forestall every awful possibility of violence.

Similarly, we can’t even say what led our Crusader-tatted Secretary of Defense to personally order the murder of two men who survived the first murderboat operation on September 2.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Trump claims these murderboat operations combat drug trafficking. That was always suspect. Not only are many of the people killed at most low-level shippers, but killing traffickers was less useful than capturing them.

And Trump’s promise to pardon former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was a major drug trafficker, suggests Trump is not so much opposed to drug trafficking, he just wants a cut.

What we do know about Hegseth, the man who ordered defenseless men to be murdered, is that the Fox News host repeatedly failed efforts to vet him — first when he was excluded from defending the Capitol after January 6, and then the multiple warnings of abuse, incompetence, and addiction reviewed during his confirmation process.

And so it was that Pete Hegseth happily uprooted Sarah Beckstrom from her home to serve as a prop for Trump’s authoritarian theater, where she was as predicted, targeted.

[M]ilitary commanders had warned that their deployment represented an easy “target of opportunity” for grievance-based violence. The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them.

Hegseth kept Beckstrom deployed even after Judge Jia Cobb ruled, six days before Beckstrom was shot, that state governors, including WV’s Patrick Morrisey, don’t have the authority to send their Guard to DC without being invited by DC.

[T]he out-of-state National Guards are likely operating in the District in a manner contrary to law. Under section 502(f), state law defines the permissible use of the National Guard under state control—i.e., which missions the governors can order their units to conduct. Here, the state governors whose units are currently operating in the District lack authority to order these missions because the District has not properly sought their aid under D.C. law and the EMAC.

This vetting failure, Pete Hegseth, happily obeyed Trump’s order to bring even more Guard troops to DC, whose mission of “crime deterrence and passive patrolling” will now require more Metropolitan Police Department effort to protect the Guard from being targeted again.

Two alleged murderers brought demons with them from Afghanistan to the US. Both together got a young woman with all her dreams and life ahead of her killed.

And yet we’re not removing the more obvious vetting problem to prevent further disasters.

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I am not surprised that Peter Skandalakis asked to dismiss the Georgia prosecution against Donald Trump. The fault for its dismissal lies primarily with Fani Willis for giving him the opportunity to dismiss it.

But Skandalakis’ dismissal is dishonest in many places and outright false in one case: notably, in his claim that Jack Smith concluded that he could not prosecute the case after SCOTUS interfered.

The strongest and most prosecutable case against those seeking to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results and prevent the certification of those votes was the one investigated and indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Although Special Counsel JackSmith’s federal case encompassed evidence from multiple states, he ultimately concluded the federal case could not be prosecuted because of the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States and the re-election of President Donald J. Trump.

Special Counsel Jack Smith wrote in his report, “Conversely, a select few of Mr. Trump’s agents and elector nominees had insight into the ultimate plan to use the fraudulent elector certificates to disrupt the congressional certification on January 6 and willingly assisted…. In each of the targeted states, Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators successfully organized enough elector nominees and substitutes to gather on December 14, cast fraudulent electoral votes on his behalf, and send them to Washington, D.C., for the congressional certification.”28

The criminal conduct alleged in the Atlanta Judicial Circuit’s prosecution was conceived in Washington, D.C., not the State of Georgia. The federal government is the appropriate venue for this prosecution, not the State of Georgia. Indeed, if Special Counsel Jack Smith, with all the resources of the federal government at his disposal, after reviewing the evidence in this case and considering the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v.United States, along with the years of litigation such a case would inevitably entail, concluded that prosecution would be fruitless, then I too find that, despite the available evidence, pursuing the prosecution of all those involved in State of Georgia v. DonaldTrump, et al. on essentially federal grounds would be equally unproductive.

The evidence had nothing to do with Smith’s decision to drop the case when Trump was reelected. Indeed, before the election he had laid out how he still planned to do so, as he laid out in his immunity brief.

This motion provides a comprehensive account of the defendant’s private criminal conduct; sets forth the legal framework created by Trump for resolving immunity claims; applies that framework to establishthat none of the defendant’s charged conduct is immunized because it either was unofficial or anypresumptive immunity is rebutted; and requests the relief the Government seeks, which is, at bottom, this: that the Court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.

This was a cowardly and partisan dodge by Skandalakis, one that sacrifices the integrity of Georgia’s democracy.