Yesterday, the guy in charge of FBI’s National Security Branch, Michael Glasheen, exhibited the same kind of cowardice that allowed January 6 to happen, when he delivered the scripted lines that Kash Patel and Donald Trump permit him to say at the Global Threats Hearing. First, he sustained the bullshit claim that Antifa was the greatest threat to the US, then he played dumb when asked about the Proud Boys.

This is precisely the kind of cowardice that allowed January 6 to happen.

To be sure, there are several layers of cowardice built into this. Glasheen shouldn’t have been testifying in the first place; Kash should have been. But unusually for the Global Threats hearing, Kash blew off the committee entirely and Kristi Noem left early after one and then another Democrat personalized the veterans her goons have targeted and the Americans she arrested.

Then early in the hearing, Bennie Thompson (after making a clear misstatement to call the shooting of two National Guards members in DC only to have Noem refuse to admit that Rahmanullah Lakhanwal received asylum under Trump) asked Glasheen about terrorist threats. Here’s how USA Today described the exchange.

“When you look at the data right now, you look at the domestic terrorist threat that we’re facing right now, what I see from my position is that’s the most immediate violent threat that we’re facing on the domestic side,” he said.

But when Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi, the ranking chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, asked whether the group is headquartered or how many members it has, Glasheen did not have answers.

“We are building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen said.

“So what does that mean?” Thompson replied. “We’re trying to get the information. You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that? How many members do they have in the United States, as of right now?”

Glasheen said the number is “very fluid” and that the investigation into the movement and its members is ongoing, comparing it to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

[snip]

“Well, the investigations are active,” Glasheen responded, pausing before closing his mouth.

Thompson shook his head.

“Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee and say something you can’t prove. I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did,” the congressman said, ending the exchange.

The exchange was one of the most-reported stories from the hearing yesterday (the advantage Ranking Members have for going first).

But few provided the background.

It was this kind of cowardice — it was precisely this kind of politicized threat focus — that allowed January 6 to happen. Bill Barr, too, was pushing the Antifa myth in advance of Trump’s insurrection. Trump even prepared precisely the kind of terrorist designation in advance that he rolled out in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, no doubt anticipating clashes that didn’t arise.

More troubling, a bunch of people in the Proud Boys network were treated as informants on Antifa rather than used to collect awareness of the militia. There was Jenny Loh, as Brandi Buchman described in her coverage of the trial.

Tarrio’s next witness is teed up for Monday after much commotion: FBI informant Jennylyn Salinas, also known as “Jenny Loh.”

Loh’s anticipated appearance threw proceedings into disarray last week as defense attorneys claimed they had no idea Loh was an informant. Loh maintains she told her handlers nothing about her interactions with the Proud Boys and that once the government became aware that she could be called to testify in the case, her informant relationship ended completely. Prosecutors say Loh, who was associated with Latinos for Trump, was an informant from April 2020 through this January and only received a single payment from the bureau after sharing footage with agents of people harassing her at home. Loh has said that her communications with the FBI were not about Proud Boys but the threat that antifa posed.

More troubling still, there was “Aaron,” whose participation in the Kansas City cell made it incredibly difficult for prosecutors to prosecute those participants. WaPo described his testimony while describing the larger problem.

[A]t least four FBI sources were approached by the defense. Two others are on trial. And it was federal prosecutors who undermined the credibility of a federal informant, suggesting that the man — who only pronounced his name as “Aaron” — had deleted evidence and eliciting testimony that he repeatedly understated his own participation in the riot.

[snip]

On cross-examination, “Aaron” — who did not spell his name into the trial record — acknowledged that a member of his Kansas City Proud Boys chapter “had said some pretty wild things” about violence in advance of Jan. 6 that he did not share with the FBI. He admitted entering the Capitol without FBI authorization and not revealing that he helped prop open a gate for other rioters.

He later tried to justify his actions to agents by saying he thought he could help stop the destruction of “items of historical significance or historical artifacts,” according to the testimony.

The evidence shown in court indicates that many of the FBI sources inside the Proud Boys were asked only about their ideological opponents on the left, even as the right-wing group was implicated in threats and violence at protests across the United States.

[snip]

“Aaron” testified Wednesday that before Jan. 6, the FBI never asked him to look for information about the Proud Boys. When he informed his handler that he was coming to D.C. for the protest, he was asked only “to try to see if I could locate someone in D.C. that had nothing to do with the Proud Boys,” he testified.

The FBI missed an attack on the Capitol in significant part because they treated right wing threat actors as informants rather than a far more urgent threat.

I have no doubt Glasheen knows he’s chasing ghosts, which explains his discomfort. I have no doubt that Glasheen, as Chris Wray did before him, is treading carefully to avoid being fired. He probably calculates, correctly, that if he gets fired, a less competent whack job would replace him.

This is all by design: The fearmongering at FBI did, already, and will, again, blinds the FBI to real threats.

Oh hey!

If it’s Thursday, it must be get no-billed by the Letitia James grand jury again!

Virtually every outlet (Politico, NYT, WaPo, AP, CNN) reports that DOJ tried again to indict New York’s Attorney General, once again getting no-billed by the grand jury. Maybe, just maybe, there’s not probable cause that Attorney General James did what frothers claim she did?

The day was not entirely a loss for Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer Masquerading as a US Attorney, though.

She almost managed to comply with Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s order yesterday to comply with Judge KK’s earlier order from last Saturday.

Before Judge KK’s deadline of 10 AM, Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer Masquerading as a US Attorney filed something called, “NOTICE of Appearance by Lindsey Halligan on behalf of UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (Halligan, Lindsey) (Entered: 12/11/2025),” dated Monday, which looks like this:

The metadata shows that Fay Brundage created the document. It also shows that it was actually created on December 8, as if they thought the better of actually filing a notice of appearance.

And at the same time, Robert McBride filed something called, “NOTICE of Appearance by Robert Kennedy McBride on behalf of UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (McBride, Robert) (Entered: 12/11/2025),” also dated Monday, which looks like this:

The metadata for that show no one changed the metadata from the original US Courts template created in 2008.

Hours and hours after Judge KK’s deadline, Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer Masquerading as a US Attorney filed something called, “NOTICE Certificate of Compliance by UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (Halligan, Lindsey),” meant to comply with this order from Judge KK.

The United States and its agent, the Attorney General of the United States, are ORDERED to identify, segregate, and secure the image of Petitioner Richman’s personal computer that was made in 2017, his Columbia University email accounts, and his iCloud account; any copies of those files; and any materials obtained, extracted, or derived from those files (collectively, “the covered materials”) that are currently in the possession of the United States.

The United States and its agents, including the Attorney General of the United States, are further ORDERED not to access the covered materials once they are identified, segregated, and secured, or to share, disseminate, or disclose the covered materials to any person, without first seeking and obtaining leave of this Court.

Here’s the language of the certificate of compliance, which is also dated December 8, which — hey! — is closer than Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer Masquerading as a US Attorney normally gets.

On December 6, 2025, the Court entered an Order [DE 10] stating that the government would “identify, segregate, and secure the image of Richman’s computer that was made in 2017, his Columbia University email accounts, and his iCloud account; any copies of those files; and any materials obtained, extracted, or derived from those files . . . currently in the possession of the United States.” The Court further ordered the government to not access, share, disseminate, or disclose these materials without further permission of the Court. Finally, the Court required the government to certify compliance with the Order by 12:00 p.m. ET on December 8, 2025.

The metadata shows that our good friend James Hayes — the guy in the thick of efforts to try to use material unlawfully accessed — is back, if only in spirit.

According to Carol Leonnig, Lindsey will be formally nominated to be US Attorney (which was already in the works). But Chuck Grassley pushed back on Trump’s complaints about the confirmation process (though without mentioning blue slips specifically). Honestly, it would be a lot of fun to have a Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer confirmation hearing.

But she may be too busy studying up on the difference between a man, a woman, and a ham sandwich.

It is just over nine years to the day since Jared Kushner naively asked Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak to use Russian secure facilities to communicate in such a way that US spies wouldn’t find them.

Kushner went forward with the meeting that Kislyak had requested on November 16. It took place at Trump Tower on November 30, 2016.1139 At Kushner’s invitation, Flynn also attended; Bannon was invited but did not attend.1140 During the meeting, which lasted approximately 30 minutes, Kushner expressed a desire on the part of the incoming Administration to start afresh with U.S.-Russian relations.1141 Kushner also asked Kislyak to identify the best person (whether Kislyak or someone else) with whom to direct future discussions—someone who had contact with Putin and the ability to speak for him.1142

The three men also discussed U.S. policy toward Syria, and Kislyak floated the idea of having Russian generals brief the Transition Team on the topic using a secure communications line.1143 After Flynn explained that there was no secure line in the Transition Team offices, Kushner asked Kislyak if they could communicate using secure facilities at the Russian Embassy.1144 Kislyak quickly rejected that idea.1145

Shortly after Kushner indicated his enthusiasm for back-channel discussions that US spies couldn’t find, Sergei Kislyak threw Sergey Gorkov at him — someone who would dangle financial goodies that would require overturning sanctions to collect, someone functionally analogous to Kirill Dmitriev.

The accounts from Kushner and Gorkov differ as to whether the meeting was diplomatic or business in nature. Kushner told the Office that the meeting was diplomatic, with Gorkov expressing disappointment with U.S.-Russia relations under President Obama and hopes for improved relations with the incoming Administration.1157 According to Kushner, although Gorkov told Kushner a little bit about his bank and made some statements about the Russian economy, the two did not discuss Kushner’s companies or private business dealings of any kind.1158 (At the time of the meeting, Kushner Companies had a debt obligation coming due on the building it owned at 666 Fifth Avenue, and there had been public reporting both about efforts to secure lending on the property and possible conflicts of interest for Kushner arising out of his company’s borrowing from foreign lenders.1159)

In contrast, in a 2017 public statement, VEB suggested Gorkov met with Kushner in Kushner’s capacity as CEO of Kushner Companies for the purpose of discussing business, rather than as part of a diplomatic effort. In particular, VEB characterized Gorkov’s meeting with Kushner as part of a series of “roadshow meetings” with “representatives of major US banks and business circles,” which included “negotiations” and discussion of the “most promising business lines and sectors.”1160

It’s all there in the Mueller Report, plain as day: From the very start Jared Kushner planned to use his role in Trump’s White House for his own benefit. It was in the background of his dealings with Mohammed bin Salman, who has domesticated him since. It was the plan for Russia, too, until Mike Flynn’s shitty OpSec scuttled the plan.

Even in the first iteration of this fraud, Jared was hiding what he was doing from the Secretary of State — at that point Rex Tillerson.

And then Kirill Dmitriev picked right up where he left off eight years earlier, finding the weak venal levers for Trump and, ultimately, Jared. The plan didn’t succeed in February. It came closer but didn’t succeed in August. In November, once Dmitriev finally got Kushner on board, it seems to be succeeding.

It’s all worth revisiting again given this important (but nauseating) report from WSJ– one they themselves suggest is the follow-up to their report, Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine.

The way the Russians succeeded in getting Trump to sell out Ukraine and the West (and I promise you, Trump has no fucking clue the ramifications of this and probably doesn’t give a fuck anyway) was by taking the $300 billion seized by Europe as punishment for their invasion of Ukraine — money Europeans were hoping to use to arm Ukraine — and instead used it to bribe Trump, effectively.

The Trump administration in recent weeks has handed its European counterparts a series of documents, each a single page, laying out its vision for the reconstruction of Ukraine and the return of Russia to the global economy.

The proposals have sparked an intense battle at the negotiating table between America and its traditional allies in Europe. The outcome stands to profoundly alter the economic map of the continent.

The U.S. blueprint has been spelled out in appendices to current peace proposals that aren’t public but were described to The Wall Street Journal by U.S. and European officials. The documents detail plans for U.S. financial firms and other businesses to tap roughly $200 billion of frozen Russian assets for projects in Ukraine—including a massive new data center to be powered by a nuclear plant currently occupied by Russian troops.

Another appendix offers America’s broad-strokes vision for bringing Russia’s economy in from the cold, with U.S. companies investing in strategic sectors from rare-earth extraction to drilling for oil in the Arctic, and helping to restore Russian energy flows to Western Europe and the rest of the world.

[snip]

If the U.S. vision prevails, it would override Europe’s own plans to shore up Ukraine’s wartime government and further cement Russia’s economic isolation. The result is what several officials described as a frenzied race to move ahead before the U.S. imposes its own arrangements.

U.S. officials involved in the negotiations say Europe’s approach would quickly deplete the frozen funds. Washington, on the other hand, would tap Wall Street executives and private-equity billionaires to invest the money and expand the amount available to invest. One official involved in the talks said the pot could grow to $800 billion under American management. “Our sensibility is that we really understand financial growth,” the official said.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had held productive conversations with the investment firm BlackRock’s chief executive, Larry Fink.

The U.S. negotiating team sees shared economic activity and energy interdependence as the cornerstone of its business-for-peace philosophy: Ukrainian data centers would draw power from the currently Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, for example.

Some European officials who have seen the documents said they weren’t sure whether to take some of the U.S. proposals seriously. One official compared them to President Trump’s vision of building a Riviera-style development in Gaza. Another, referring to the proposed U.S.-Russia energy deals, said it was an economic version of the 1945 conference where World War II victors divvied up Europe. “It’s like Yalta,” he said.

Just as pitching Trump on a Riviera where millions of Gazans once lived, Bibi Netanyahu solicited Trump’s assistance in genocide, so has Dmitriev convinced Trump to sell out the Western order by turning the nuclear plant they stole into fuel for a data center.

As Judd Legum lays out, this is all happening via a guy, Jared, effectively serving as an agent of the Saudis.

Kushner is engaged in activities that can only be conducted by government officials. The Logan Act bars private citizens from engaging in negotiations with foreign governments without authorization. Kushner is acting in an authorized capacity, under Trump’s direction, and that creates a host of legal issues.

As a de facto SGE with substantial authority, the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits Kushner from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Since leaving the White House in 2021, Kushner has raised at least $4.8 billion for Affinity Partners, his private equity firm. Nearly 99% of Affinity Partners’ funding comes from foreign sources. The largest investment, $2 billion, came from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF).

The Saudi government pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, or $25 million annually. Other investors, including the governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), pay annual fees of up to 2%. As of September 2024, Affinity Partners had collected $157 million in fees, mainly from Middle Eastern governments.

Kushner is continuing to collect these fees as he serves in a top foreign policy role for the Trump administration. This is precisely the kind of behavior the Foreign Emoluments Clause was designed to prevent.

See also Legum’s assessment of Jared’s role in Paramount’s effort to buy Warner using foreign (and Jared’s) money.

Horse trading away a half century alliance is bad enough.

But remember: These people are horrible businessmen. There’s no sign that Jared has any competence to judge these deals on the merits. He’s not a competent businessman, he’s a captured one.

And Trump was vastly more successful as a businessman when reality TV show producers controlled the plot than he every was IRL.

Throw enough goodies at my son-in-law and I will betray Europe, Donald Trump seems to be saying.

And that’s all it took.

Around mid-day (maybe my time? maybe yours?), everything went wrong in the Dan Richman docket, in his bid to stop DOJ from violating his Fourth Amendment rights in their bid to indict Jim Comey.

The Clerk alerted the filers of four of the last filings they had fucked up.

Richman’s attorneys — lawyers from NY who filed docket # 9 and 15 — had filed a document signed by the people who posted it under someone else’s PACER login. The Clerk reminded Richman’s lawyers the person who actually signs into PACER to file something must have signed the document.

The other error was potentially more serious. DOJ’s two filings, 12 and 13, which were DOJ’s identical bid to lift the restraining order on accessing Richman’s data and opposing Richman’s motion for a TRO, noticed a different error. Best as I can explain it, the guy who filed this stuff, John Bailey, is not on the filings at all.

Not scintillating, perhaps. But nevertheless a testament to the fact that this docket, with its NY lawyers for Richman and a mix of shady lawyers for DOJ, were not doing what the clerk’s office checks to make sure the people actually making court filings have ethical skin in the game.

This came after another apparent problem in the docket. By all appearances, Pam Bondi had blown off Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s order that someone at DOJ confirm they were following her order that the entire government will stay out of Dan Richman’s stuff until Friday.

The Attorney General of the United States or her designee is further ORDERED to certify that the United States is in compliance with this Order no later than 12:00 p.m. ET on Monday, December 8, 2025.

It turns out DOJ’s failure to file anything on the docket was just another problem with the docket.

After both DOJ and Richman filed their filings yesterday (which I wrote about here) and after neither responded to Judge KK’s order that if they want to discuss these files, they may need to do a filter protocol, Judge KK weighed in again.

She noticed the same thing I did!! None of the people making these claims wanted to put their own ethical skin in the game. This is, significantly, what she seemed to be looking for when she made sure Richman got someone to file a notice of appearance.

Today’s order reveals what happened with her order to file a notice of compliance by Monday: They emailed it, two minutes before her deadline (but fucked up Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s filing … and anything else would frankly shock me at this point, because this has happened with pretty much everything filed under her name since she first showed up for Trump).

In response to this Court’s [10] Order dated December 6, 2025, Attorney Robert K. McBride sent an email to this Court’s Chambers at approximately 11 :58 a.m. ET on December 8, 2025, attaching a document certifying the Government’s compliance with the Court’s [10] Order, along with proposed Notices of Appearance for himself and Attorneys Todd W. Blanche and Lindsey Halligan. 1

1 The document that the Court is construing as a proposed Notice of Appearance for Attorney Halligan was attached with the filename “NOA Halligan,” but the substance of the document appeared to be a Notice of Appearance for Attorney Blanche. Another document attached to Attorney McBride’s email, entitled “NOA Blanche” was identical to this document except that it omitted Attorney Blanche’s Bar number.

She then laid out the two problems I did here. “[P]roviding documents by email is not a substitute for filing them on the docket.” “Attorney Bailey’s electronic signature does not appear in the body of the Government’s [12] Response and Motion–only the electronic signatures of Attorneys Blanche, Halligan, and McBride appear-and Attorney Bailey has not filed a notice of appearance.”

And then she laid out the problem with it — the reason I’ve been watching it closely this week.

To ensure that counsel who are accountable for the Government’s representations and legal positions in this matter are accurately identified in the official record of this case, it is ORDERED that all counsel of record for the Government shall file notices of appearance no later than 10:00 a.m. ET tomorrow, December 11, 2025.

She needs someone to hold accountable. She needs ethical skin in the game.

And then she ordered someone to file a certification of compliance on the docket, like she originally expected, by tomorrow morning.

It is further ORDERED that, no later than the same deadline, 10:00 a.m. ET tomorrow, December 11, 2025, the Government shall file on the docket its certification of compliance with this Court’s [10] Order dated December 6, 2025.

Who knows what happens next?!?!

What I do know is Todd Blanche and his buddies are awfully squirmy about what they’re doing. And I’m not the only one who noticed.

Update: Here are two other dockets in which Todd Blanche played a key role:

• In LaMonica McIver, in which he is witness, substitute US Attorney, and the guy who bypassed PIN, only the AUSAs appear.
• In Jeffrey Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell), in which Blanche was the only signer of the original motion to unseal and in the district where he worked as an AUSA, he did file a notice of appearance, before others filed after him. Of course he got admitted in DC via representing Trump.

Update: Welp. DOJ failed. Robert McBride and Lindsey Halligan filed notices of appearance (albeit in each other’s names). Todd Blanche did not.

But they did not, as Judge Kollar-Kotelly ordered them to do, filed their certification of compliance to the docket.

It’s not just the US updating its national threat assessments, in public and in private.

From the NYT:

Denmark’s military intelligence service raised concerns for the first time about the United States in its annual threat assessment, saying in a report released Wednesday that shifts in American policy are generating new uncertainties for Denmark’s security.

The report points to the United States’ use of tariffs against allies and its intensified activity in the Arctic, and raises many of the same concerns that European leaders have voiced about the direction of President Trump’s America-first foreign policy.

“The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies,” the report said.

More from the Danish news site Politiken (Firefox translation):

Particularly one specific sentence stands out in the annual threat assessment, where the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (FE) lists external threats and security policy challenges for Denmark.

And notably, it is not about Russia or China. For the first time, the intelligence service in the report titled ’Udsyn 2025’ also focuses on the United States under Donald Trump’s leadership.

»The US is now using its economic and technological strength as a means of power, even against allies and partners«, the main conclusion states.

In an interview with Politiken, the head of FE cites examples such as the threats and imposition of tariffs, the belligerence over Greenland (including US-Greenland talks that exclude Denmark), and attempting to make Denmark (and others) dependent on US technologies.

But with Donald Trump’s statements about wanting to take over Greenland, are you as a service then forced to be interested in the U.S.’s actions in the same way as you do with Russia and China?

»The U.S. has for many years been and remains our most important ally when it comes to our security. So we work closely with the U.S. and with the American services in several areas. That is no secret. It is also clear that we are concerned with how the U.S. acts and also have dialogue with the U.S. regarding American interests«.

But doesn’t it almost go without saying that if someone wants to take over part of Denmark’s territory, it is your job to keep track of it?

»There is no doubt that it interests us and falls within our task. What instruments we use, we do not comment on«.

Is the U.S. our friend or enemy?

»I think that is a political question. We do not focus on friends and enemies; our task is to look at what security policy challenges and threats Denmark faces«.

Not a friend.
Not an enemy.
Someone who presents security challenges and threats.

Politiken goes on:

According to Professor of International Politics Ole Wæver from the University of Copenhagen, it is remarkable that FE »finally« suggests that the U.S. and Europe are no longer two sides of the same coin. For Denmark, he describes it as a »painful divorce« because, compared to many other European countries, we have been »hyper-Atlantic«.

»One thing is that we cannot take for granted that the U.S. is our eternal, reliable ally when we need to counter a threat from Russia and China. The next is how to relate to the fact that the U.S. itself can be a threat. Not least in Greenland. If the service really delved into that question, they would need to write an entire chapter about it in Udsyn«, he says.

Those are not exactly the words any US ambassador or US Secretary of State wants to hear said about the US. The US poses challenges and threats like an ex-spouse, rather than being an eternal, reliable ally? Ouch.

[Let us pause to remember that Trump is the ex-spouse of not one, but two women. Post-Stormy Daniels, we can only speculate on the status of his relationship with wife #3. One can only imagine how much money it has cost Trump to minimize the challenges and threats posed by ex-spouses. But I digress.]

How close was this relationship before? It wasn’t that long ago that the NSA and the FE cooperated in tapping the phones of European leaders like Angela Merkel, and now it’s come to this.

Trump has taken the US relationship with the rest of the world from being the “Leader of the Free World” to “America First” to “America Against the World.” Lovely.

Perhaps Trump might understand this if I put it another way: We’re talking about the Ryder Cup, with Nukes. (And Trump will recall how the Ryder Cup without nukes turned out.)

Lawrence Freedman must have finished his post on the National Security Strategy before the latest news on it, which is that there’s an even more alarming longer version.

Nevertheless, Freedman’s observations about the process behind the document — that Michael Anton is thought to have started it, before he left in September, and Stephen Miller may have finished it — provide one possible explanation for why the document is so short, shoddy, and unenthusiastic about matters of standard policy.

It is worth reading the most recent NSS in its entirety. It is less polished than its predecessor, betrays little evidence of consultation, and is considerably shorter (33 as against 70 pages). It reads like time had run out and a deadline had been reached. It ends abruptly with a short discussion on Africa, this administration’s least important region, without a proper conclusion. It was released without fanfare in the early hours of Friday morning, without a press conference, suggesting the White House was not sure what to do with it.

The first draft has been attributed to Michael Anton, who was the Director of Policy Planning in the State Department until September 2025, when he left. It may be that Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff who represents the hardest line MAGA views, completed the document or at least oversaw its completion. This perhaps explains why, as Gideon Rachman notes, when restating standard policy positions, for example on Taiwan, the prose is ‘dutiful’ – ‘one senses that the author’s heart is not in it.’ Only on the civilizational issues and when praising Trump does it get fired up.

Much of the document seeks to give the administration’s disparate policies, including those directed against DEI hires or climate change or immigration, some coherence and international relevance.

This hypothesis — that some of its unfinished nature arises from having its author, Michael Anton, depart before he finished would raise a bunch of questions in any case.

Politico first reported Anton’s departure in August (so in the wake of the Anchorage summit), but said he would leave once he finished the National Security Strategy.

A senior Trump administration official and a Senate aide said Anton plans to depart this fall. The State Department later confirmed that he is leaving his post.

Anton, who directs the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, has been a low-profile but powerful presence with major roles on Russia, Iran and other foreign policy matters, including helping shape President Donald Trump’s still-unpublished national security strategy.

With Secretary of State Marco Rubio also serving as the national security adviser, a handful of political appointees such as Anton and Counselor Mike Needham have taken on more of the daily responsibilities of running the State Department.

Anton is expected to leave as the Trump administration wraps up writing the national security strategy, of which he is a lead author, according to the senior administration official. The official, and others, were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

[snip]

The Senate aide and another person familiar with administration dynamics said that Anton had been frustrated by Office of Presidential Personnel Director Sergio Gor shooting down a number of his potential hires and officials with the Trump administration such as Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby freelancing on key issues.

Anton had tried to resign in the spring amid frustration with the foreign policy processes of the administration, but Needham refused to let him do so, according to the Senate aide and two other people familiar with the matter.

The aide and one of those people said Anton was frustrated after being passed over as deputy national security adviser in the reshuffle after the departure of former national security adviser Mike Waltz.

But he ended up leaving in September, months before the NSS was dumped onto the world with no notice.

Which makes the Defense One claim all the more interesting. There’s a longer version of the NSS, which is even more inflammatory.

A longer version of the NSS, circulated before the White House published the unclassified version late Thursday night, shares the main points: competition with China, withdrawal from Europe’s defense, a new focus on the Western Hemisphere. But the unpublished version also proposes new vehicles for leadership on the world stage and a different way to put its thumb on the scales of Europe’s future—through its cultural values.

It was even more hostile to the EU than the public version is.

Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland are listed as countries the U.S. should “work more with…with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union].”

“And we should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life…while remaining pro-American,” the document says.

It excluded European nations from the alternative to the G7 it proposed, a C5 composed of China, Russia, India, Japan, and the US.

His national security strategy proposes taking this a step further, creating a new body of major powers, one that isn’t hemmed in by the G7’s requirements that the countries be both wealthy and democratically governed.

The strategy proposes a “Core 5,” or C5, made up of the U.S., China, Russia, India and Japan—which are several of the countries with more than 100 million people. It would meet regularly, as the G7 does, for summits with specific themes.

Most interesting — and something to which I’ll return — the unpublished version disavows hegemony.

The full NSS also spends some time discussing the “failure” of American hegemony, a term that isn’t mentioned in the publicly released version.

“Hegemony is the wrong thing to want and it wasn’t achievable,” according to the document.

These are, at this point, just data points. The existing NSS is shoddy and illogical. Michael Anton was going to see it through to completion but did not. There is reportedly a longer version — could that be what Anton wrote? Or could that be why he left before it was finished?

And we’re left with something that could have been written by Russia.

Today was a big day in New Jersey. It was the day that both Congresswoman LaMonica McIver and DOJ had to submit supplemental fillings in McIver’s case about whether the second of three charges against her fit entirely within her duties of oversight as a Congressperson.

It was also the day after Alina Habba finally gave up play-acting as US Attorney in the wake of the Third Circuit ruling that such play-acting was unlawful, something that sane-washing journalists inaccurately called a resignation.

Indeed, the most interesting thing about the government’s response was that it was signed by the guy, Phillip Lamparello, Pam Bondi installed to oversee criminal matters as part of her contemptuous refusal to permit a US Attorney be appointed in a legal manner (which may be why Todd Blanche remains on these filings, because this is still bullshit).

Otherwise, that motion complained that, “the Defendant had not included among her exhibits the video footage that most clearly depicted the events described in Count Two.” It argued that physical contact initiated by ICE was just a continuation of what happened outside the gate.

The Defendant’s actions as alleged in Count Two were simply the continuation of her actions in Count One, albeit with a different individual being subject to her ongoing efforts to interfere with the Mayor’s arrest.

And it argued that when ICE assaults members of Congress it still must be treated as an assault on ICE unprotected by Speech and Debate.

The Government respectfully asserts that any assault upon a federal officer should qualify as an act that is “clearly non-legislative” given that such an act is clearly an “illegitimate activity.” And it would be clearly non-legislative whether the arrest that triggered the assault took place outside the Security Gate or inside of Delaney Hall.

By contrast to the government’s terse 9-page response, McIver’s 19-page supplemental brief cites ten videos and two sealed Signal chats.

2. Exhibit X is a true and correct copy of a signal chat produced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as part of a folder titled USA-000353, including participants from DHS and HSI. This exhibit will be filed under seal pursuant to a protective order signed by the parties and entered by the Court. See ECF No. 38.

3. Exhibit Y is a true and correct copy of a signal chat produced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as part of a folder titled USA-000334, including participants from HSI. This exhibit will be filed under seal pursuant to a protective order signed by the parties and entered by the Court. See ECF No. 38.

Most of McIver’s filing conducts a second-by-second analysis of the video, showing that when she got back inside the gate she immediately headed towards the facility and not to where Mayor Baraka was being arrested without probable cause.

But a footnote describes one of the things in those Signal chats (another appears to have been notice that McIver and her colleagues said they were there to conduct oversight).

It wasn’t until November 26 — almost two weeks after Judge Jamel Semper ruled on McIver’s immunity bid —  that DOJ turned over texts copying this video, observing that it looked bad.

5 The Spotlight News video came to light during the course of supplemental briefing only because it was referenced in a May 9, 2025, text message that the government finally turned over on November 26, 2025. HSI special agents exchanged the video in that May 9 conversation, where the agents also acknowledged that the evidence in the video was “bad.” Ex. Y at 2-3. The prosecution team therefore clearly knew about the text messages (and thus the video) when disclosures were due in July.

McIver’s lawyer, Paul Fishman, says he will address this delayed discovery in a follow-up letter.

Inexplicable delays in the government’s discovery productions mean that the record continues to be developed.1

1 Congresswoman McIver will detail these shortcomings in a forthcoming letter to the Court.

But the implication of this is clear.

DOJ was never going to turn over these discussions — conducted on Signal — until Judge Semper ordered this supplemental briefing. They were sitting on evidence that shows that before DHS first started calling McIver’s actions an assault on May 10 (McIver had to ask to have these Tweets taken down, but the timeline is in her motion to do so), they had shared video noting that their own actions looked bad.

Over and over this year, DHS has assaulted opponents of ICE and then charged them for it. And these Signal texts sure seem to support that they knowingly did the same thing with Congresswoman McIver.

And then buried it in a discovery violation.

Update: At the status hearing pertaining to these filings, which was on November 17. McIver’s attorneys complained they were getting screen shots of Signal texts collected by Agents rather than texts with actual metadata from the posts.

Your Honor, I will just tee up that we have, you know, that there is certainly going to be an issue with respect to the government’s messages. We have received a partial production of the messages. I believe it is 54. And, you know, we are going to be, you know, we are preparing a letter to send to Your Honor. We have had some dialogue —

THE COURT: The text messages between the agents on the day in question?

MR. CORTES: That is correct, Your Honor. We have gotten 54 of them. They are a mish-mash of things of what appear to be Signal chats. Some of which seem like text messages. We have gotten a few emails.

But the broader issue I think, Your Honor, and just to preview it, obviously, I will put this in writing because I don’t — I want Your Honor to have the complete take, and, obviously, the government is going to have responses; but just as an overview, Judge, the messages that we have gotten, appear to be messages that the agents themselves searched for on their devices, applying search terms that the government tells us that they supplied to the agents, but they would not share with us the entirety of what those search terms were.

And then the agents took their devices and took photographs, screen shots of the messages that were responsive to the search terms that they applied. And then provided that to the government. And the government provided us a selection of those screen shots.

This led the AUSA to ask Judge Semper to provide clear guidelines of what they should be turning over, which led to this colloquy.

MR. CORTES: That I — One, the government, that the prosecutor, the A.U.S.A. should be the one conducting this search, applying the search term, applying, you know, conducting the review. Right? They should be the ones conducting the review.

THE COURT: Yes.

MR. CORTES: The other thing I would add is, if there is material before and after the visit that is dealing with how to deal with the members of the congress that are showing up or in the wake of the experience that is, that is, right, that is material, that deals with it, that deals with reactions, all of that as well.

THE COURT: Then I think we are in search term land.

MR. CORTES: Sure.

THE COURT: But for this period of time 12 and 5, Ijust think we are in, you know, what do the videos show, what do the text messages show land. And if there is something beyond that that you see, counsel, you are an officer of the court, I respect whatever representation you put before me.

You can do your search terms on the other areas outside of the block that I’ve mentioned. If there are things that relate to the congressional delegation and the visit, procedures that would occur, obviously, I’m very focused on 527, so anything that relates to that, would be fair game.

But for right now, let’s just do it quick and dirty; 12 to 5. And then anything that floats from that, that you think needs individualized assessment, come to me. I’m here

So one explanation for the late disclosure of these messages are that the Agents were withholding them in their own searches.

Update: I realize that DOJ never complied with this part of Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s order.

The Attorney General of the United States or her designee is further ORDERED to certify that the United States is in compliance with this Order no later than 12:00 p.m. ET on Monday, December 8, 2025.

This court filing is a smokescreen.

DOJ — in the persons of Todd Blanche, some lady impersonating a US Attorney, and First AUSA Robert McBride — have responded to Dan Richman’s demand that they stop illegally rifling through his data.

It’s a remarkable filing for two reasons.

First, they cite a bunch of precedents claiming that one cannot use Rule 41 to thwart a prosecution. Best as I can tell, every single one of those precedents pertain to someone trying to withhold his own property to thwart his own prosecution. Michael Deaver trying to stop a Special Prosecutor investigation of himself. Paul Manafort trying to thwart a prosecution of himself. Justin Paul Gladding in a case where he was trying to get his own non-CSAM data back after a conviction. A grand jury case where the subject of the investigation tried to get his files back.

None of these apply here.

Effectively, Todd Blanche is saying Dan Richman has to lay back and enjoy digital compromise to allow the FBI to prosecute his friend and who cares if they’re breaking the law to do so.

But I’m also struck by the lies Blanche and the lady impersonating a US Attorney tell along the way. Consider this passage.

Richman served as a special government employee at the FBI between June 2015 and February 2017.1 Shortly after his departure from the FBI, the Government began investigating whether Richman had disclosed classified information to The New York Times concerning Comey’s decisionmaking process concerning the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. See CM/ECF No. 1-1 at 3. The investigation demonstrated, among other things, that Comey had used Richman to provide information to the media concerning his—that is, Comey’s—decisionmaking process concerning the Clinton email investigation and that Richman had served as an anonymous source in doing so.

During the course of the investigation, the Government sought and obtained four search warrants in this district authorizing the Government to search for and seize evidence of violations of 18 U.S.C. §§ 641 and 793 from certain email accounts utilized by Richman, a hard drive containing a forensic image of his personal computer, and his iCloud account.2 See CM/ECF No. 1-1 at 3.

Comey provided relevant testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee shortly before his employment as FBI Director was terminated, and again in September 2020. In May 2017, he testified in response to questioning from Senator Grassley that he had never authorized someone at the FBI to serve as an anonymous source regarding the Clinton email investigation. And in September 2020, he reaffirmed that testimony in response to questioning from Senator Cruz.

1 The government has provided the concise factual summary herein out of an abundance of caution as a result of the Court’s December 6, 2025 temporary restraining order (the “TRO”). See CM/ECF No. 9 at 4. Should the Court have meant the TRO to permit the government to use materials obtained via the relevant search warrants as part of this litigation, the government is prepared to provide a more detailed factual summary if necessary.

2 The investigators sought to obtain evidence of violations of 18 U.S.C. § 641 because it appeared that Richman and Comey were using private email accounts to correspond regarding official government business, i.e., that their correspondence were “record[s]” of the United States. See id.

First, the passage makes a confession, one that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer Impersonating a US Attorney’s Loaner AUSAs never made: the use of May 2017 files involving attorney-client privilege had no basis in the prosecution, because they long post-dated the time Dan Richman left the FBI.

The filing misstates the genesis of Arctic Haze and the focus on Dan Richman. The investigation didn’t start by focusing on Richman. The focus on Richman appears to have started when John Durham discovered his communications while rifling through the image he shared with the Inspector General (a detail that seems quite sensitive, given the redactions).

The claim that the investigation demonstrated that Comey used Richman,

to provide information to the media concerning his—that is, Comey’s—decisionmaking process concerning the Clinton email investigation and that Richman had served as an anonymous source in doing so.

Is not backed by anything in the public record. Richman was not anonymous when doing this in fall 2016, and there’s no evidence that Comey asked Richman to do this in February 2017, where he was also an on-the-record source.

This filing obscures the fact that when Comey told Chuck Grassley he had not leaked anything anonymously, it preceded the time when Richman did share his memos anonymously, and he disclosed that publicly a month later, meaning it could not conceivably have been a lie on May 3, 2017 (before he shared the memo) or after June 8, 2017, in September 2020, because he had already disclosed it.

McBride claims he’s not using the unlawfully accessed materials in this filing, but he did disclose something new: that Richman and Comey were investigated under 18 USC 641 not because Comey shared a memo that the Inspector General would later rule was official FBI material, but because they were conducting official business on personal accounts (which is rich given that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer masquerading as US Attorney used Signal for official business).

The lies are important for a reason beyond the cynicism: They obscure that if the FBI tried to get a warrant for these very same files, they would never be able to access the files they want.

And so they’re telling Dan Richman to just lay back and enjoy the Fourth Amendment violations.

Update: Richman’s response says exactly what I did (but in fancy lawyer-speak): The citations DOJ relied on all pertain to someone trying to get their own content back to prevent their own prosecution.

[I]n every single case cited by the government on this point, the movant was the target of an active investigation or the defendant in a charged criminal case. See In re Sealed Case, 716 F.3d at 604, 607 (observing that “the [DiBella] Court . . . found that each motion was tied to a criminal prosecution in esse because both movants had been arrested and indicted at the time of appeal” and that the movant in the case before it was “the subject of an ongoing grand jury investigation”) 6 ; Martino v. United States, 2024 WL 3963681, at *1 (3d Cir. Aug. 28, 2024) (movant was the “subject of an ongoing grand jury investigation” and brought a Rule 41(g) Motion tied to “his criminal prosecution”) (emphasis added); United States v. Nocito, 64 F.4th 76, 79 (3d Cir. 2023) (movant entities were owned by person charged with crime); In re Grand Jury, 635 F.3d 101, 105 (3d Cir. 2011) (finding DiBella’s second requirement met because “the property was seized in connection with an ongoing grand jury investigation of which the appellant is a target”) (emphasis added); In re Warrant Dated Dec. 14, 1990 & Recs. Seized From 3273 Hubbard Detroit, Mich. on Dec. 17, 1990, 961 F.2d 1241, 1242 (6th Cir. 1992) (involving “records . . . sought in connection with a criminal investigation of the appellants for tax evasion, filing of fraudulent tax returns, and conspiracy”).

Professor Richman is not a subject, target, or defendant. Though the government elides this fact, it bears repeating: because Professor Richman is not a prospective criminal defendant, he has no suppression remedy to address an ongoing violation of his constitutional rights. His property was seized five years ago, pursuant to warrants tied to a separate and since concluded investigation, and there is no indictment and no pending criminal case.

I actually think they might envision including him in a Grand Conspiracy indictment. But they’re pretending they’re not currently working on this and so got too cute for their own good — he notes that they twice dismissed his claims of irreparable harm because he was only at risk of being a witness at trial.

One reason I laid out what Stephen Miller and Trump’s other sad little advisors think they’re doing in their National Security Strategy is because once you do that, it makes it even more clear that their overestimation of their own competence is dooming the United States.

Fully seven pages of the short (33 pages as compared to Trump’s 68-page 2017 NSS and Sleepy Joe Biden’s 48-page 2022 one) document blather about what it is trying to accomplish: two pages announcing the adoption of utilitarianism over values, two laying out what the US should want, another laying out what Trump thinks the US wants from the world, and two more laying out what means the US has to get there.

This is the work of a bunch of men who imagine they are competent telling everyone who came before them that they were doing things wrong.

Yet by laying all that out — by writing down what they imagine competence would deliver — they make it clear how badly they’re screwing up.

Effectively, Donald Trump has already done significant, if not grave, damage to six of the ten things that Trump claims America wants:

1. Continued survival of US sovereignty
2. Protect the country from human trafficking, foreign influence, propaganda, and espionage
3. “A resilient national infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters, resist and thwart foreign threat”
4. The most dynamic economy
5. A robust industrial base
6. Unrivaled soft power that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency”)

Start with the obvious ones.

Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and Elon Musk spent the first six months of this Administration trashing America’s soft power. These boys seem to imagine they can replace it with something that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency.” Except no one else will believe in American decency after it suddenly withdrew funding that resulted in the deaths of 600,000 people, two thirds of them children. People won’t trust you after you renege on paying the bills.

Or consider that 2nd bullet, which reads this way:

We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage, predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and influence operations, cultural subversion, or any other threat to our nation.

Of course, Trump claims to combat drug trafficking with his murderboat killings, even while he lets increasingly major drug criminals out of prison.

As for the rest? On her first day in office, the Attorney General stopped policing foreign influence, destructive propaganda, and influence operations; then Kristi Noem piled on by shutting down other programs combatting foreign influence and propaganda.

And, as an endless stream of stories reveal, both Pam Bondi and Noem have reassigned those who would hunt spies and human traffickers to go hunt undocumented grannies and day laborers instead.

Worse, the priority on weaponization has resulted in the loss of those people. Just the firing of a bunch of people who took a knee during the George Floyd protests to deescalate resulted in the firing of a counterintelligence Deputy Assistant Director and a supervisor.

a. In late March 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 was informed that she was being removed at the direction of Defendant Patel from her position at FBI Headquarters as a Deputy Assistant Director for the FBI overseeing counterintelligence at the direction of Defendant Patel because she kneeled on June 4, 2020. Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 had been specifically identified in then-Representative Gaetz’s letter. Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 retained her SES status but was demoted to a Section Chief position.

b. In April 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 was serving as the Legal Attache for the FBI based overseas along with her family. In that capacity, Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 had previously provided briefings to Defendant Patel with which he said he was very impressed. Nevertheless, on April 3, 2025, an FBI senior leader informed her that she was being removed from her term position in the Senior Executive Service to a non-Senior Executive Service position, abruptly uprooting her entire family and resulting in a significant pay decrease. The FBI senior leader informed Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 that Defendant Patel had indicated that his mind was made up and could not be changed.

c. In April 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 9 was demoted from her position as a supervisor overseeing all FBI ransomware and malware investigations. An FBI senior leader informed her that the demotion came straight from top level FBI leadership.

d. In April 2025, Defendant Patel directed the removal of Plaintiff Jane Doe 8 from her position supervising a counterintelligence squad.

There were even greater losses in DHS’ purges.

That’s part of the problem with bullet 3: The NSS’ grand plan to make America’s infrastructure more resilient. Along with gutting those who protect against foreign influence, Noem has gutted those who protect against hacking and natural disasters.

As for bullets 4 and 5? Trump’s trade war has had the opposite effect than he claimed it would, with historic layoffs and struggling manufacturing and small businesses.

Again, Trump did affirmative damage rather than achieving his goals.

Then there’s the question of sovereignty.

For all its yapping about America First, the NSS doesn’t deal with the way that Trump has been trading away America’s advantages to any rich foreigner with millions in cryptocurrency. Just yesterday, for example, Trump approved the sale of one of Nvidia’s most complex chips to China on the same day Houston’s US Attorney rolled out showy prosecutions for Chinese men accused of illegally exporting those very same chips.

“The United States has long emphasized the importance of innovation and is responsible for an incredible amount of cutting-edge technology, such as the advanced computer chips that make modern AI possible,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “This advantage isn’t free but rather the result of our engineers’ and scientists’ hard work and sacrifice. The National Security Division, along with our partners, will vigorously enforce our export-control laws and protect this edge.”

Alan Hao Hsu aka Haochun Hsu, 43, Missouri City, and his company, Hao Global LLC, both pleaded guilty to smuggling and unlawful export activities Oct. 10.

According to now unsealed court documents, between October 2024 and May 2025, Hsu and others knowingly exported and attempted to export at least $160 million worth of export-controlled Nvidia H100 and H200 Tensor Core graphic processing units (GPUs).

Trump already authorized the export of even more complex chips to Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, the same sovereigns backing Paramount’s hostile bid to take over a big chunk of the US entertainment industry (that’s after China’s Tencent was dropped).

And these are just the areas where Trump has most obviously failed his own standards.

He built in a gimme in those standards he actually accomplished by claiming to want nuclear deterrent but then stating, falsely, that the Golden Dome would deliver such a deterrent.

We want the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent, plus next-generation missile defenses—including a Golden Dome for the American homeland—to protect the American people, American assets overseas, and American allies.

Mark Kelly explained how unrealistic this effort was months ago.

And as for the hope that the rest of the world will use American technology, one of the things Trump wants from the rest of the world?

We want to ensure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward.

As for those chips Trump cleared for sale, China is limiting their use.

As for American biotech, the rest of the world is instead importing America’s scientists who’ve been defunded as part of Trump’s anti-intellectual purges.

There’s plenty else in this NSS (such as other references to America’s technical superiority) where the boys aspire to have skills they affirmatively destroyed.

As such, the NSS isn’t so much a strategy (a word they scare quote when they define it): it’s a confession that these self-declared competent people are failing to meet their own standards.

Last week, the Trump Administration released the National Security Strategy that was dated from the month before.

In an effort to highlight how the Administration — no doubt led by Stephen Miller and his fascist allies — claims to have adopted a utilitarian foreign policy stemming from things called principles and based on wildly imaginary assessment of America’s current strengths, this post will lay out what is in it. (Note, the titles are links.)

Follow-ups will say more.

Pages 2-3: My fellow Americans

This is a letter from Trump bragging about what he claims his accomplishments since Biden left are. They include:

• Restoring borders (this does not explicitly talk about immigration)
• Kicking qualified trans service members and other “DEI” hires out of the military
• Making NATO allies pay 5% in defense costs
• Getting Congress to pay $1 trillion for a Golden Dome that won’t work
• Launching a trade war that has devastated soybean farmers, bankrupted many small businesses, and allowed China to acquire leverage by withholding rare earth products
• Attacking Iran’s nuclear facility and claiming the attack did more damage than it did (this makes no mention of the inconclusive attack on the Houthis or the murderboat strikes)
• Forcing Americans to prefer oil and gas over strategically smarter renewable energy
• Ending eight wars (he claims)

Among the things this letter does not mention is destroying USAID and America’s soft power, and obviously it treats some of the grave damage Trump has done with his trade war and attacks on science and universities as strengths.

Page 4: Contents

Pages 5-6: Ends over Values

Two pages describing that the US has been doing everything wrong since the Cold War, chasing “platitudes” (also known as values) rather than desired ends.

Pages 7-8: What Should the US Want

These two pages describe a bunch of things it claims the US should, normatively, want.

Just half of these are things Trump has actually pursued (and even there, some of Trump’s policies have gone beyond what Trump says is ideal):

• ¶3 Secure borders and controlled immigration
• ¶5 A lethal military in which everyone is proud of their mission
• ¶6 A Golden Dome
• ¶10 A reinvigorated American culture (code for white nationalism)

More than half of these are things Trump has affirmatively destroyed:

• ¶1 Continued survival of US sovereignty
• ¶2 Protect the country from human trafficking, foreign influence, propaganda, and espionage
• ¶4 “A resilient national infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters, resist and thwart foreign threat”
• ¶7 The most dynamic economy
• ¶8 A robust industrial base
• ¶9 Unrivaled soft power that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency”)

Page 9: What do “we” want from the rest of the world?

• A Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
• Halt damage an unnamed China has done while keeping stability in Indo-Pacific and keeping shipping lanes free and supply chains secure
• Impose Stephen Miller’s idea of civilizational identity on Europe
• “[P]revent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the ‘forever wars’ that bogged us down”
• “[E]nsure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward”

Note, this section parallels the discussion of regions, below, with the exception of laying out how the US will remain the standard-setter in the world by being an asshole and adopting crank conspiracies.

Pages 10-11: What are America’s means to get these ends?

This includes a list of things the US did have when Trump took over (I’ve italicized those which he has squandered, though there are others he is squandering):

• A still nimble political system that can course correct;
• The world’s single largest and most innovative economy, which both generates wealth we can invest in strategic interests and provides leverage over countries that want access to our markets;
• The world’s leading financial system and capital markets, including the dollar’s global reserve currency status;
• The world’s most advanced, most innovative, and most profitable technology sector, which undergirds our economy, provides a qualitative edge to our military, and strengthens our global influence;
• The world’s most powerful and capable military;
• A broad network of alliances, with treaty allies and partners in the world’s most strategically important regions;
• An enviable geography with abundant natural resources, no competing powers physically dominant in our Hemisphere, borders at no risk of military invasion, and other great powers separated by vast oceans;
• Unmatched “soft power” and cultural influence; and
• The courage, willpower, and patriotism of the American people.

It also includes a list of things that Trump thinks are good, which I’ve restated to reflect reality:

• “Instilling a culture of competence:” They’ve gotten rid of brown people and women who made them insecure
• “Unleashing our enormous energy production capacity:” They’ve forced America to stop competing in renewable energy
• “Reindustrializing our economy:” They’ve gutted the economy with tariffs
• “Returning economic freedom to our citizens:” They’ve exploded the deficit with tax cuts to oligarchs huge tax cuts while cutting the health care that drives the economy
• “Investing in emerging technologies and basic science:” They’ve destroyed America’s higher educational advantage and replaced it with state socialism

The strategy

Pages 12-15: Principles [sic]

This starts with a page of shite about Trump’s greatness. Then includes the following bullets:

• Focused Definition of the National Interest (Trump will ignore key parts of the world)
• Peace Through Strength (white nationalism)
• Predisposition to Non-Intervention (with excuses permitted for invasions of choice)
• Primacy of Nations (a nice way of saying they’ll gut international organizations)
• Sovereignty and Respect (in which the NSS protects projecting “free speech” demands into other sovereign nations)
• Balance of Power (China and Russia can extend their power so long as they allow America to do the same)
• Pro-American Work (claims utterly inconsistent with Trump’s catering to oligarchs)
• Fairness (code for making NATO, Japan, and South Korea pay more)
• Competence and Merit (White men should not have to compete with brown people and women, and especially should not have to compete with H1B holders)

Pages 15-19: Priorities

• The Era of Mass Migration Is Over: “Border security is the primary element of national security”
• Protection of Core Rights and Liberties: This is defined as “the rights of free speech, freedom of religion and of conscience, and the right to choose and steer our common govern,” but apparently does not include due process or similar rights for Europeans or the Anglosphere
• Burden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting: “The United States will stand ready to help— potentially through more favorable treatment on commercial matters, technology sharing, and defense procurement—those counties that willingly take more responsibility for security in their neighborhoods and align their export controls with ours.”
• Realignment Through Peace: The President will intervene everywhere and claim to have fostered peace
• Economic Security
  • Balanced Trade
  • Securing Access to Critical Supply Chains and Material
  • Reindustrialization
  • Reviving our Defense Industrial Base: We need to build drones in the US cheaply
  • Energy Dominance (in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear, explicitly)
  • Preserving and Growing America’s Financial Sector Dominance

Page 19: The Regions

A half page excusing largely ignoring key swaths of the world, as when you dedicate just a half page to Africa or mention Russia only in a section discussing Europe not as a place but a greatness to be imposed from outside.

Pages 19-23: Western Hemisphere: The Donroe Doctrine

• Enlist: Treat a swath of countries as agents insofar as they can help stop the movement of people and drugs
• Expand: Eight paragraphs on combatting “foreign influence” not named as Chinese, and three paragraphs imagining this can be driven by corporate investment

Pages 23-29: Asia: Win the Economic Future, Prevent Military Confrontation

• Leading from a position of strength: Asia has gotten strong through manufacturing and we will combat that with false platitudes
• Economics: the Ultimate Stakes: A claim that Trump’s disastrous trade policy will bring results the opposite of what have happened
• Deterring Military Threats: A lot of talk about deterrence, some in passive voice

Pages 29-31: Promoting European Greatness

These are the two pages attracting the most attention, and I will return to it. Note that Europe is not described as a place, like the other regions are. The only mentions of Russia (ten) are in this section, and Russia is defined as not-Europe (and therefore not addressed as a region at all).

Pages 31-33: The Middle East: Shift Burdens, Build Peace

This section claims the Middle East is no longer as important because it is not longer the dominant energy producer, and then explains that major conflicts (including radicalism) are no big deal anymore.

Half of page 33: Africa

Africa will not get aid. It will get investment and Trump claims of peace deals.