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From the GAO yesterday, via Government Executive:

National Weather Service meteorologists who assist air traffic controllers are working overtime, skipping leave and taking on more responsibilities due to worsening staff shortages, according to a Government Accountability Office report published Thursday, which criticized the Federal Aviation Administration for not doing enough in response to the problem.

“Not having identified and addressed the risks of the current staffing levels is concerning given the potential safety effects if aviation meteorologists are overworked and the quality of their services to air traffic controllers is diminished,” investigators wrote.

Well *that* doesn’t sound good. What exactly do they mean by “diminished”?

As of June, NWS said the aviation meteorologist workforce is down to 69 employees, partly as a result of the federal hiring freeze and separation incentive programs like deferred resignation. FAA and NWS in February agreed to a cap of 81 full-time equivalents for such positions. (In 2024, prior to the agreement, the report said that the FAA was pushing to lower that number to 71.)

Under a 2016 interagency agreement between FAA and NWS, there are supposed to be three meteorologists and one meteorologist in charge at each of the 21 air route traffic control centers across the U.S. But that is not achievable under the February agreement.

GAO reported that the control center in Oakland, Calif., is down to one meteorologist, another four centers have only two such employees and five centers don’t have a meteorologist in charge.

OK, you’ve got my attention now. I used to live in Oakland and then elsewhere in the East Bay, and this is nuts.

But let’s back up a minute, to make a few things clear. The FAA has facilities in every airport air traffic control tower. These folks handle takeoffs, landings, ground control on the taxiways, and other local issues. These are not the places this report is discussing. The FAA also has 21 regional air traffic control facilities that handle regional air traffic flow (see the map above). These are the facilities that worry the GAO.

Suppose you are flying from Denver to Oakland. When you take off, the Denver tower is in charge. Once you reach a certain altitude/distance from the airport, the pilot switches over to the Denver regional National Airspace System [NAS] hub for instructions and guidance. As you fly west, the Denver hub passes control to the Salt Lake City hub, and eventually to the Oakland regional hub. Finally, as you approach the Oakland airport, the pilot contacts the Oakland airport control tower for the final approach and landing.

Each of these regional NAS hubs, in the course of handling traffic issues, pays a lot of attention to the weather. Ever hit turbulence or storms? The meteorologists can predict where they are likely to appear, and (depending on severity) the NAS controllers then can either warn the pilots to expect minor turbulence in a particular area, or route the flights around that area if it is deemed severe.

So let’s go back to that Denver to Oakland flight.

The Rocky Mountains can create a *lot* of turbulence. Especially in the summer. Like during the Labor Day weekend. As you fly west, you come to other smaller but similar areas, like the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California and ultimately the hills and mountains that surround the San Francisco Bay. Complicating things, the SF Bay has three major commercial airports — SF, Oakland, and San Jose — as well as dozens of smaller municipal fields, private corporate airstrips, and military bases. In other words, there is a lot of air traffic in a relatively small area.

And according to the GAO, the Oakland regional air traffic control hub, instead of having four meteorologists, is down to just one.

One.

And it’s not like that one can clock out at 5pm and tell all the planes to tune in to “weather on the 8’s” on the radio or the 5:15 weather report on the KRON evening news to get updates they need.

I’ve had the pleasure of being the pastor to more than a few NWS meteorologists, and they have told me in detail about their love for their work. I’ve rejoiced with them when their severe weather warnings have saved lives, even when a tornado blows a town to bits. Over the last six months, I’ve also grieved with them as they have seen their agency stretched beyond the breaking point. Some of their friends have been let go as “redundant” or “wasteful”, others are fearing that they may be next to get the axe or be forced to relocate themselves and their families, and *everyone* is working far more than is healthy. We’re talking vacations cancelled, days off postponed, and suddenly having to work a double shift.

And it’s been like this for half a year, with no end in sight.

From the GAO report:

The NAS [National Airspace System] is currently under tremendous strain as air traffic controller shortages and periodic equipment failures in aging air traffic control systems have been leading to delayed and canceled flights. We and others have reported on these challenges, and we currently have ongoing work in these areas.11 Severe weather can exacerbate such strains on the NAS as FAA reports that weather is the leading cause of cancellations and delays.12 Multiple stressors on the NAS can lead to compounded adverse conditions for passengers. For example, the widespread delays and cancellations Southwest Airlines experienced in December 2022 began with weather problems that were compounded by carrier system failures.13

The purpose of this report is to inform you and Congress about another stressor on the NAS—concerns about aviation meteorologist staffing levels—which we identified in our ongoing work on aviation operational preparedness.14 These meteorologists work directly with air traffic controllers in the command center and en route centers, providing face-to-face briefings as necessary, and helping them safely direct flights to avoid severe weather. We recognize that determining the appropriate weather forecasting resources to effectively support the safe and efficient operation of the NAS may take time to examine in depth. However, given the urgency of the issues, and that the interagency agreement is scheduled to expire in September 2025, we are sharing this information with you now.

This report from the GAO is a flashing red light, a bone-chilling siren, trying to get the attention of people with the power to change things. I only hope it works.

Given that we’re talking about a government headed by a guy who thinks he is smarter than all the meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center and the NWS, and can predict the path of hurricanes simply by using his sharpie, I am not confident things will change at all.

Here’s hoping the worst the flying public has to deal with this weekend are baggage problems and seats with cramped leg room.

I feel like I’m watching a bad sequel to a scary movie from 20 years ago.

Back in 2004, Dick Cheney and the Bush White House were desperate to get the Department of Justice to sign off on an extension to an NSA warrantless wiretapping program. Complicating matters was the fact that AG Ashcroft was in the ICU at George Washington University Hospital and had designated Deputy AG Jim Comey to be the acting AG while he was incapacitated.

And make no mistake: Ashcroft *was* incapacitated. In broad strokes, no one just hangs out in an ICU – you’re there because you are in bad shape and need constant observation and often constant medications/treatments. Most conversations that happen in an ICU are between the staff and the family, and less so with the patient, because the patient is less-than-competent because of their condition, their medications, or both.

Comey was known by the WH to be opposed to extending this program, so the WH tried an end round to induce Ashcroft to sign the relevant documents without Comey’s knowledge. Before Alberto Gonzales (WH Counsel) and Andy Card (WH Chief of Staff) could get to the hospital, word reached Comey of what was up. Bart Gellman described it like this in his book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency as excerpted in the WaPo:

In early evening, the phone rang at the makeshift FBI command center at George Washington University Medical Center, where Ashcroft remained in intensive care. According to two officials who saw the FBI logs, the president was on the line. Bush told the ailing Cabinet chief to expect a visit from Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr…..

Alerted by Ashcroft’s chief of staff, Comey, Goldsmith and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III raced toward the hospital, abandoning double-parked vehicles and running up a stairwell as fast as their legs could pump.

Comey reached Ashcroft’s bedside first. Goldsmith and his colleague Patrick F. Philbin were close behind. Now came Card and Gonzales, holding an envelope. If Comey would not sign the papers, maybe Ashcroft would….

Unexpectedly, Ashcroft roused himself. Previous accounts have said he backed his deputy. He did far more than that. Ashcroft told the president’s men he never should have certified the program in the first place.

When everyone left the hospital, Comey, Mueller, and other DOJ folks began writing letters of resignation. Again, from Gellman:

All hell was breaking loose at Justice. Lawyers streamed back from the suburbs, converging on the fourth-floor conference room. Most of them were not cleared to hear the details, but a decision began to coalesce: If Comey quit, none of them were staying.

At the FBI, they called Mueller “Bobby Three Sticks,” playfully tweaking the Roman numerals in his fancy Philadelphia name. Late that evening, word began to spread. It wasn’t only Comey. Bobby Three Sticks was getting ready to turn in his badge.

Justice had filled its top ranks with political loyalists. They hoped to see Bush reelected. Had anyone explained to the president what was at stake?

Whelan pulled out his BlackBerry. He fired off a message to White House staff secretary Brett Kavanaugh, a friend whose position gave him direct access to Bush.

“I knew zilch about what the matter was, but I did know that lots of senior DOJ folks were on the verge of resigning,” Whelan said in an e-mail, declining to discuss the subject further. “I thought it important to make sure that the president was aware of that situation so that he could factor it in as he saw fit.”

Kavanaugh had no more idea than Whelan, but he passed word to Card.

The timing was opportune. Just about then, around 11 p.m., Comey responded to an angry summons from the president’s chief of staff. Whatever Card was planning to say, he had calmed down suddenly.

God help us all.

NYT has a weird article — right wing propagandist Devlin Barrett is the first byline, with Maggie and Mike contributing as well — purporting to explain the John Bolton investigation. The first and fourth paragraphs claim that the investigation into Bolton is a “a long-running investigation” that “began to pick up momentum during the Biden administration,” claims that conflict with both the NYP’s seeded propaganda story on the search, which described that Kash Patel, “reopened the matter after he took over the FBI in February,” and a well-sourced CNN story, which described that, “the Justice Department reopen[ed] the years-old investigation.”

NYT bases its claim suggesting a continuous investigation on the collection from an adversarial spook service, during the Biden Administration, of emails purportedly sent by Bolton to family members.

The emails in question, according to the people, were sent by Mr. Bolton and included information that appeared to derive from classified documents he had seen while he was national security adviser. Mr. Bolton apparently sent the messages to people close to him who were helping him gather material that he would ultimately use in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”

But way down in ¶12, NYT describes that John Ratcliffe briefed these emails to Kash Patel and between them they decided that these emails included classified information.

During Mr. Trump’s second term, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, briefed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, on the information that had been collected about Mr. Bolton’s emails. The officials believed that the material Mr. Bolton had transcribed into the unclassified and unsecured email contained classified information. Each intelligence agency makes its own determinations about what information is classified, so it is often up to the “originating” agency to decide whether particular pieces of information are classified, and how sensitive they are.

That is, Ratcliffe found something he could use to target Bolton and brought it to Kash. That’s what gave Kash the excuse to reopen the investigation.

This is about where credible DOJ reporters would start ringing alarm bells, because it makes this investigation not like other investigations into classified documents — NYT likens this investigation to the Hillary email investigation, Trump’s own theft of classified documents, and the investigation into Joe Biden — but the John Durham investigation, which Ratcliffe and Kash launched based off emails stolen from Russia which — we now know — were fabricated.

There are even indices in this story that suggest caution. The object of the search, NYT says, was to see whether Bolton possessed anything to corroborate the emails, precisely the approach Durham tried to take with Leonard Benardo.

One major reason for conducting the searches was to see if Mr. Bolton possessed material that matched or corroborated the intelligence agency material, which, if found, would indicate that the emails found in the possession of the foreign spy service were genuine, the people said.

Even according to NYT, the FBI still has no fucking clue whether these emails are genuine (and apparently didn’t take less intrusive means to check, such as a covert warrant to Bolton’s email provider).

Nevertheless, NYT invents explanations for why the material in question didn’t end up in Bolton’s book.

The material in the intercepted emails included information that Mr. Bolton did not ultimately use in his book. That may suggest that he had been told it remained classified during early reviews of his manuscript or that he ultimately decided to omit it, because of either its sensitivity or its importance.

In a story that admits the FBI doesn’t know whether these emails are genuine or not, they don’t consider another explanation: That Bolton may not have written the emails at all, just as Leonard Benardo didn’t write emails reporting on a devious Hillary Clinton plot to make something of Trump’s ties to Russia.

Look, we just learned that Ratcliffe and Patel participated in a 4-year effort to frame Hillary Clinton based off emails fabricated by Russian spies. Can you please not be so horny to normalize all this that you ignore that the fact pattern here is precisely the same?

When NYT first ran this story on August 5 — with the two earlier WSJ stories (July 17; July 24), the third story providing unprecedented details on the Epstein scandal during the period Trump has tried to bury his sex trafficking problem — I noted two things about it: The exceedingly weird treatment of Todd Blanche’s visit with Ghislaine Maxwell, in which NYT mentioned neither Blanche by name nor his title.

The White House had pledged to release details about the federal investigations into Mr. Epstein and his associates. But this summer the Trump administration backpedaled. The ensuing right-wing outrage has threatened to splinter the Make America Great Again movement — for whom Mr. Epstein is a central figure in conspiracy theories — and has put Mr. Trump on the defensive like few other issues.

Seeking to quell the backlash, the Justice Department dispatched a top official to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s longtime associate who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking. On Friday, Ms. Maxwell was moved to a lower-security facility. [my emphasis]

The other remarkable aspect of the story is the absolute dearth of any source description for the photos from Jeffrey Epstein’s brownstone. None appears in the story or credited on the photos.

The refusal to provide any hints as to source carried over to the response that lead reporter David Enrich gave to a question about sourcing:

These are good questions, but I’m afraid there’s not a whole lot I can say because of the need to protect sources who provide us with information. The one thing I feel comfortable sharing is that we published this information as soon as we were able. This is not something we’ve been sitting on.

I fully recognize that it is frustrating as a reader not to have transparency about where/how journalists get information like this, but I hope you can also understand that protecting sources is paramount — people need to be able to trust that we will protect their confidentiality when they come to us with important information.

Viewed in the aftermath of the release of the Ghislaine Maxwell transcripts (July 24, July 25), however, something else sticks out.

First, there’s the number of people mentioned in the story also mentioned in Maxwell’s interview:

• Ehud Barak
• Leo Wexner
• Fidel Castro
• Elon Musk
• Pope John Paul II
• Larry Summers
• Bill Clinton
• Richard Branson
• Bill Gates
• Martin Nowak

There are people mentioned in the story that Blanche did not ask about: Mortimer Zuckerman, Woody Allen, Steve Bannon, Mick Jagger, and Joi Ito.

But of those who are mentioned, at least the Clinton picture suggests a closer relationship between Clinton and Epstein than Maxwell described in her interview (a point made in this analysis of the transcripts).

TODD BLANCHE: Did — and you’re not, I think you said, you don’t — you’re not aware of President Clinton ever going to the island?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: He never. Absolutely never went. And I can be sure of that because there’s no way he would’ve gone — I don’t believe there’s any way that he would’ve gone to the island, had I not been there. Because I don’t believe he had an independent friendship, if you will, with Epstein.

Did they speak? Did he go? Yes, but that’s very different from going to spend time on an island.

Most striking, however, is how the story — with its attention to the video cameras visible in two rooms — debunks Maxwell’s claim that there were no video cameras in the brownstone, that there was no wiring for such cameras, a claim that Maxwell offered up to substantiate her claim that Epstein could not blackmail anyone.

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Right. I — I think this is a really good place to start with how this story began.

TODD BLANCHE: Okay.

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: So even, let’s assume that that premise is correct, that he was doing that and he was going to tell everybody, going to say, “oh, you know, you had inappropriate relations with an underage girl.” If you don’t have a video or photograph, photographic evidence, because I — I’m not sure that even the FBI would take that. Well, maybe today, but certainly not back then, would take that seriously.

So you have to have something to say, “Hey, you know, look, I’ve got this video of you doing terrible things and you need to.” So I built those houses, many of them. I decorated those houses. I put the electricians in for the wiring. I never wired, nor saw, a single house that had any type of inappropriate, let’s say, video surveillance.

And I’ll define that for you.

Inappropriate surveillance would mean in a bathroom, in a bedroom, in any private area of a home.

TODD BLANCHE: In a room where there were massages given?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Inappropriate. I would say I would define “appropriate” surveillance to be the front door of a house, or potentially, as in 71st Street, the physical plant. Anywhere else would be grotesque.

TODD BLANCHE: So I just want to come back to — I know I’m just hopefully stating the obvious, but when you say “the houses,” you’re talking about his New York —

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Yes.

TODD BLANCHE: — brownstone?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Yes.

There it is in the NYT, proof plain as day, that Maxwell’s claim there were no video cameras at the brownstone is false (though as described, the cameras were only in Epstein’s private space).

Yesterday, the same day Bill Gates quietly met at the White House with Trump, we learned that Gates had defunded Arabella Foundation, and with it a number of left-leaning groups. Gates is the most prominent person reported to be blackmailed by Epstein. If the FBI collected evidence that Epstein had blackmail material on Gates, Trump would now have it.

It was quite clear from Blanche’s interview that he wasn’t interested in meeting with Trump’s sex trafficker buddy to advance any normal investigative interests. He was offering Maxwell something she wanted — a chance to damage the victims again, a chance for cozier digs — in hopes of getting dirt on Trump’s political adversaries, and he was doing so to staunch the stories focusing on Trump’s close ties to Epstein.

Todd Blanche did none of the things a competent proffer would do. He didn’t insist on dates, he didn’t test Maxwell’s answers, he appeared to work mostly from gossip. On the specific question of whether Maxwell “stole” Trump’s spa girls, which Maxwell first denied:

TODD BLANCHE: Do you know whether masseuses from Mar-a-Lago’s spa ended up giving massages to — private massages to Mr. Epstein? I’m not asking for what you may have read, but from — at the time, from your personal knowledge, do you know whether that’s true?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I — I don’t — I don’t recall. Is it possible? Yes. But I don’t remember — I don’t remember that. So I don’t want to — I don’t recall that, but it’s possible.

TODD BLANCHE: Do you have a recollection of you ever recruiting a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago spa to give — to go give a private massage to Mr. Epstein?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I’ve never recruited a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago for that, as far as I remember. I can’t ever recollect doing that.

TODD BLANCHE: Okay. So what — what I think we should do now, it’s about 12:15. We’ll take a — we’ll take a break and we will come back in a little bit.

Then, the next day, conceded could have happened but Blanche prodded her for a specific denial that Maxwell recruited Virginia Giuffre there.

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Some more names did come to me in the night, and I did have some additional memories just for clarity. I believe I said that I couldn’t think of anybody who I may have asked from Mar-a-Lago, but then I realized that I was — the allegation at least is that I met [redacted] in Mar-a-Lago and so I felt that I needed to address that. And I didn’t want to leave that hanging because that seems weird under the circumstances.

And also — but I couldn’t remember anyone and — maybe, you know, it’s a long period of time.

So the issue is not that I’m trying to not say, but I just don’t — I don’t remember anybody that I would have. But it’s not impossible that I might have asked someone from there.

TODD BLANCHE: I don’t — I don’t know exactly what you said yesterday, but I don’t think what you said yesterday is different than what you just said. So, yes. There’s —

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Okay. I just wanted to be — I just didn’t want to feel that I had said no to something and that it — and —

TODD BLANCHE: [redacted] definitely had has said that she was working at Mar-a-Lago and that you received a treatment of her — from her at some point, and that you recruited her to meet Mr. Epstein.

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Right.

TODD BLANCHE: Do you know, affirmatively, whether that’s true or false, or do you just not have a memory either way?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I really don’t believe it’s true. But I know that I did go to spas and if I met someone, I did ask if they’re (indiscernible) — so I don’t — in the realms of possibility, it could have, but I have no memory of it.

TODD BLANCHE: Okay. GHISLAINE MAXWELL: And I don’t believe that that it’s how it went down, but I don’t want to —

Not only did Blanche get the story wrong (Giuffre was not doing massages, she was working the desk, reading a book about massages), but he went to some length to get a specific denial on the record.

Even Trump knows this is false, as he publicly confessed days later.

Reporter 1: I’m just curious. Were some of the workers that were taken from you — were some of them young women?

Trump: Were some of them?

Reporter 1: Were some of them young women?

Trump: Well, I don’t wanna say, but everyone knows the people that were taken. It was, the concept of taking people that work for me is bad. But that story’s been pretty well out there. And the answer is, yes, they were.

[inaudible]

Trump: In the spa. People that work in the spa. I have a great spa, one of the best spas in the world at Mar-a-Lago. And people were taken out of the spa. Hired. By him. In other words, gone. And um, other people would come and complain. This guy is taking people from the spa. I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it I told him, I said, listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether they were spa or not spa. I don’t want him taking people. And he was fine and then not too long after that he did it again and I said Out of here.

Reporter 2: Mr. President, did one of those stolen persons, did that include Virginia Giuffre?

Trump: Uh, I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.

What Blanche did was not get the truth, but instead lock Maxwell into specific lies.

It was a shameful use of government resources.

But it appears to have achieved Mutually Assured Silence.

Timeline

July 6: DOJ and FBI renege on the promise to release Epstein files

July 8: Trump whines that his base kept talking about Epstein

July 15: WSJ contacts Trump about Epstein book story; Pam Bondi fires Maurene Comey

July 17: WSJ publishes first Epstein book story

July 22: News of Blanche meeting with Maxwell released

July 24: First day of interview; Maxwell claims she doesn’t remember recruiting at Mar-a-Lago; WSJ publishes second Epstein book story 

July 25: Second day of interview; Maxwell concedes she may have recruited a spa girl at Mar-a-Lago

July 29: Trump confesses he knows that Virginia Giuffre was “stolen” from Mar-a-Lago

August 1: Maxwell moved to cozier digs

August 5: NYT brownstone story

August 22: Release of Maxwell transcripts

I’m used to Mike Schmidt ignoring Trump’s weaponization of DOJ against his rivals during the first term. I’m used to Devlin Barrett credulously writing down propaganda that right wing law enforcement sources tell him to write down as if it were true.

But this, from the two of them, is a remarkable exercise in disinformation in service of a weaponized investigation.

They describe that a fox is in the hen house, but are so ignorant, naive, or corrupt that they describe the fox, instead, as a guard dog.

The factual details the story describes are:

• Kash Patel is investigating his claim that he found burn bags full of classified documents which, he claims, is proof people intended to destroy them (but which sources for the story explain is really dumb because any documents found in a burn bag would be on digital servers too)
• Paul Abbate (who was considered a candidate to be Director of FBI after Jim Comey was fired) is a subject of the investigation
• Kash put the investigation in WDVA, basing venue on a storage facility there, to avoid DC grand juries
• The US Attorney for WDVA, Todd Gilbert, recently resigned shortly after being appointed
• John Durham’s lead FBI Agent, Jack Eckenrode, who endorsed Kash to be FBI Director, is conducting interviews in the investigation
• “One of the documents investigators have been asking about…was declassified in 2020, while Mr. Trump was in office”

The men describe the Durham Report as Devlin described it in 2023 when he credulously parroted Durham’s claimed findings, without mentioning how badly the report itself undermined Durham’s claims.

Mr. Durham ultimately concluded that the F.B.I.’s work on the Russia investigation suffered from “confirmation bias” against Mr. Trump.

Mr. Durham brought two separate cases to trial on charges that people lied to the F.B.I. in the course of its Russia investigation, but both trials ended in quick acquittals.

Such a description was sloppy in 2023 but is inexcusable now, in the wake of the declassification of the classified annex. The classified annex showed that by July 2021, Durham should have concluded that the premise of his entire investigation was based on documents fabricated by Russian spies to frame Hillary.

Here’s the NYT story on that, in case Devlin and NYT Mike have difficulties learning about this.

Once you understand that the classified annex disclosed that John Durham and Jack Eckenrode knowingly spent years investigating Hillary’s people based off a Russian fabrication — literally committing the crime they were investigating — then Kash’s burn bag claim would most immediately implicate Durham and his team, including Eckenrode. Durham went to great lengths to obscure that he had been chasing Russian disinformation, even in his classified annex. Such an effort bespeaks guilty conscience, the kind of guilty conscience that might lead someone to attempt to destroy evidence.

If this were a real investigation, Eckenrode would be a suspect, not the lead investigator.

Worse still, if Kash imagines (or claims to imagine) he’s found new, hard copy versions of what he himself helped declassify in 2020 — documents that included a report about the SVR documents bearing John Ratcliffe’s name (but undoubtedly written with Kash), heavily redacted notes from John Brennan, and a somewhat redacted version of the CIA version of a referral to the FBI — then the steps that Durham’s team (that is, Eckenrode) took to access those documents in 2019 and afterwards would likewise be a central focus of any credible investigation.

Indeed, the apparent fact that Durham — that is, Eckenrode — never presented an FBI version of a September 7, 2016 referral purportedly sent to the FBI, which none of the FBI witnesses remember seeing, would be a central issue in any investigation.

That referral is something that, if it exists in hard copy, if it exists at all, might present new investigative leads.

But also would raise still more questions about the criminal conduct of Eckenrode and Durham — their willing quest to chase disinformation created by Russian spies to frame Hillary Clinton.

And it would raise real questions about whether, after chasing a Russian fabrication for years, Kash’s FBI decided to start fabricating evidence themselves.

This is an investigation led by someone who should be a chief suspect. Such investigations never turn out well.

As I’ve noted repeatedly, there should be far more attention to the fact that right wing Governors are forcing members of their National Guard to leave their homes, their families, and their jobs to avenge Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, the privileged white kid with ties to criminal hackers who allegedly got assaulted when out past 3AM one night. Most are sending their own constituents away from their homes to fight crime, allegedly, in a safer place than their own home.

And now, they’re doing so to avenge a guy accused of potential misconduct that may put their own privacy at risk.

NYT was the first to report on a new whistleblower complaint, from Social Security’s Chief Data Officer, Chuck Borges, alleging that DOGE boys created a live copy of the entire Social Security database.  Specifically, the complaint alleges:

• When DOGE personnel were given access to Social Security data in mid-March, they had equipment pin access (meaning actions could not be traced to one user) and write access, potentially violating laws protecting IRS data.
• After Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander imposed a Temporary Restraining Order on DOGE access on March 20, DOGE almost immediately restored — and expanded — access to Social Security data, potentially exposing those who granted access to CFAA hacking charges.
• After SCOTUS lifted the preliminary injunction on this data, DOGE created their own replica of SSA’s Numerical Identification System on an insecure server.

A risk assessment of recreating a live Social Security database described the catastrophic risk involved.

Developers (presumably DOGE) planned to import NUMIDENT into the cloud, and because AWS-ACI is an extension of the SSA network, any other SSA production data and PII could also be imported; “unauthorized access to the NUMIDENT would be considered catastrophic impact to SSA beneficiaries and SSA programs” [emphasis Borges’];

Since earlier this month, Borges has been trying to understand the impact of that live replica database. Those with access — including Big Balls, but also Aaram Moghaddassi, who first created the replica copies — refused to respond to his questions. What answers he did get only confirmed his concerns. And he learned the the lawyers were instructing people not to answer his questions.

That same day, in response to Mr. Borges’ August 8, 2025 request for information about concerns raised, a CIO employee confirmed that while two cloud access accounts owned by Aaram Moghaddassi were created per SSA policy, they are not managed by the Division of Infrastructure Services (DIS), are self-administered, and include access to both test and live data environments. 67 Also on August 11, 2025 in response to the same August 7, 2025 request from Mr. Borges, another CIO employee provided the July 15, 2025 PATO and the June 25, 2025 approval by Russo of the NUMIDENT data transfer.

This information, while responsive to Mr. Borges’ request for information regarding data security concerns, serves to support Mr. Borges’ reasonable belief that the creation of the DOGE specific, self-administered cloud environment lacking independent security controls and hosting a copy of NUMIDENT constitutes an abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, substantial and specific threat to public health and safety, and potentially violation of law, rule, or regulation.

Moreover, to date, Mr. Borges has not received a response to his August 7, 2025 request for information from Coristine, Solly, and Tyquiengco. Nor has he received information to indicate that the cloud environment hosting the American public’s NUMIDENT data is protected by best practice and industry standard independent security controls. This leaves Mr. Borges with the reasonable belief that the NUMIDENT data is at risk of exposure, and without information necessary to effectuate his responsibilities as CDO.

Furthermore, Mr. Borges is aware that the Office of General Counsel has advised employees not to respond to his inquiries.68 Such restriction on information to the CDO puts Mr. Borges in an untenable position inhibiting his ability to effectuate the responsibilities of his role

When Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from lifting the preliminary injunction in June, she talked about how badly the Court was skewing relative harm, granting DOGE access — including to people like Big Balls — even while privacy law protected the data.

Just last week, I wrote about the requirements for granting stay applications and, in particular, how this Court’s emergency-docket practices were decoupling from the traditional harm-reduction justification for equitable stays. See Noem, 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 5). With today’s decision, it seems as if the Court has truly lost its moorings. It interferes with the lower courts’ informed and equitable assessment of how the SSA’s data is best accessed during the course of this litigation, and it does so without any showing by the Government that it will actually suffer concrete or irreparable harm from having to comply with the District Court’s order.

[snip]

Stepping back to take a birds-eye view of the stay request before us, the Government’s failure to demonstrate harm should mean that the general equity balance tips decisively against granting a stay. See Noem, 605 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 4). On the one hand, there is a repository of millions of Americans’ legally protected, highly sensitive information that—if improperly handled or disseminated—risks causing significant harm, as Congress has already recognized. On the other, there is the Government’s desire to ditch the usual protocols for accessing that data, before the courts have even determined whether DOGE’s access is lawful. In the first bucket, there is also the state of federal law, which enshrines privacy protections, and the President’s constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the laws Congress has passed. This makes it not at all clear that it is in the public’s interest for the SSA to give DOGE staffers unfettered access to all Americans’ non-anonymized data before its entitlement to such access has been established, especially when the SSA’s own employees have long been subject to restrictions meant to protect the American people.

John Roberts and his Republican colleagues have granted a kid with ties to criminal hackers, Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, live access to every American’s Social Security data.

And Jeanine Pirro thinks she should look to the streets of DC to find crime.

Back on Friday, before Women’s World Cup Rugby distracted me for a long weekend, I started this post with the claim, “As of this moment, both Kilmar Abrego and John Bolton are free men.”

That claim, of course, has been overtaken by events.

Friday started with a search of Bolton’s Maryland home, reportedly in a renewed investigation into the mishandling of classified information that went into his book (see Ben Wittes’ first hand account here). In an interview taped (and partially released that day), JD Vance revealed not only that he was part of the investigative decisions targeting Bolton, but effectively admitted this was a fishing expedition, basically a search of the Trump critic’s home to find out if they could target him with a crime.

VICE PRES. JD VANCE:

We’re in the very early stages of an ongoing investigation into John Bolton. I will say we’re going to let that investigation proceed. What I can tell you is that, unlike the Biden DOJ and the Biden FBI, our law enforcement agencies are going to be driven by law and not by politics. And so if we think that Ambassador Bolton has committed a crime, of course, eventually prosecutions will come. But as you know, Kristen, this is all part of gathering evidence, trying to understand something that we’re worried about. And, of course, I’ll let the FBI comment on the next stage of the investigation.

KRISTEN WELKER:

What’s at the root of this? Is this about classified documents?

VICE PRES. JD VANCE:

Well, again, I’ll let the FBI speak to that. Classified documents are certainly part of it. But I think that there’s a broad concern about, about Ambassador Bolton. They’re going to look into it. And like I said, if there’s no crime here, we’re not going to prosecute it. If there is a crime here, of course, Ambassador Bolton will get his day in court. That’s how it should be. But again, our focus here is on did he break the law? Did he commit crimes against the American people? If so, then he deserves to be prosecuted.

This was heavy handed dick-wagging, the White House making it clear they were personally directing searches of Trump’s defectors.

Meanwhile, Abrego was free on Friday when I started this post. He was released from pre-trial detention in Tennessee, only to be detained at an ICE check-in on Monday. Judge Paula Xinis has ordered the government not to deport him — to Uganda — until she can review the evidence of retaliation for his decision to contest first his illegal deportation and then the Tennessee charges against him. He has formally requested to be deported to Costa Rica.

Abrego’s very good attorney, Sean Hecker, described how much courage it took Abrego to fight this fight:

One of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, Sean Hecker, said after the detention that the threat of deportation came even as Costa Rica was willing to take him in as a refugee. “The government’s campaign of retribution continues because Mr. Abrego refuses to be coerced into pleading guilty to a case that should never have been brought,” he said.

After the Bolton search, a number of people claimed it represented some new low in Trump’s efforts to demonize his opposition. Such claims always depended on misrepresenting the Durham investigation and ignoring the way Bill Barr’s DOJ framed Joe Biden. But after the confirmation that Durham chased Russian disinformation for two more years after concluding the underlying pretext for his investigation was fabricated, such assertions border on pathology.

That said, the Kilmar Abrego treatment is new; in the first Trump term, after all, DOJ would simply reverse wrongful deportations. So, too, is Trump’s claimed firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook after Bill Pulte snooped in her mortgage records and conjured up a mortgage fraud referral. This is an Administration pushing the means by which it attempts to criminalize its opponents — but that overreach may (and in Abrego’s case, arguably already has) backfire.

I want to write a series of posts on how and what he is doing.

In this post, I will lay out a kind of topology of what he is doing — and how various executive authorities overlap in them. These attempts are efforts to push the bounds of criminal prosecution, sometimes by forgoing the actual prosecution, sometimes by fabricating evidence.

In a second post, I will discuss the players. It matters that Todd Blanche has been named in two separate vindictive prosecution filings, particularly given the ruling that Alina Habba was not properly acting as US Attorney during the period when DOJ claimed not to have body cameras for two of the key witnesses in the LaMonica McIver prosecution. It matters that Kash Patel, who harbored a grudge against Bolton going back years and included him in his enemies list, gleefully tweeted as the search of Bolton’s home began. It even matters that Pulte appears to be trawling the financial records of Trump’s enemies, even while Trump’s other policies harm the housing industry.

In a third post, I’ll consider outcomes. Trump is doing this for more than just his desire to attack his enemies. But it’s not clear whether, particularly after purging the Department of Justice of competent prosecutors, he can achieve his objectives. As I’ve noted in the past, Trump is trying to satisfy a mob of rabid conspiracy theorists. While I believe the Hunter Biden prosecution raised real concerns, in general, the criminal justice system still adheres to basic laws of gravity. And those rules may thwart Trump’s effort to redefine “justice.”

In a fourth post, I’ll review John Roberts’ opinion in Trump v. US. The opinion did more than immunize Trump’s own crimes; it created conflicts that will soon land before SCOTUS.

Immigration

It is my belief that, on top of being a raging white nationalist, Stephen Miller identified immigration law as an area where the expansiveness of Presidential authority provides ready tools for fascism. After all, Miller plotted for years to use the Alien Enemies Act as a way to send hundreds of men to a concentration camp with no due process, an effort that was thwarted (for now, at least) by the Continuing Resolution that kept government open over the weekend of March 14, Chief Judge James Boasberg’s willingness to work while on vacation, and key disclosures about the lies on which the effort was based.

From that expansive authority, DOJ has explicitly tried to criminalize support for migrants. Last week, for example, Acting Los Angeles US Attorney Bill Essayli crowed that he convinced a grand jury to indict Adrian Andrew Martinez, the kid whom CBP assaulted after he called out their detention of an old guy in his Walmart parking lot. While his indictment (from nearly a week ago) is not yet docketed, the complaint against him claims Martinez was blocking the CBP vehicles. Before charging Martinez, DOJ attempted to subpoena his contacts with media, as if the media will be implicated in this conspiracy.

The charge against Martinez — conspiracy to impede a federal officer — is the same DOJ has used against David Huerta, the President of CA’s SEIU, who also was assaulted at a protest. That case keeps getting continued, which could reflect that it is one of the cases that prosecutors are having a hard time getting a grand jury to indict, or could indicate that politicized prosecutors are using the initial charge to rifle through SEIU coffers to try to substantiate something larger.

There are four other cases where Trump’s DOJ has attempted to criminalize Democrats with a crime for countering DHS’s dragnet.

I suspect that Brad Lander, who was violently detained days before the NYC Mayoral Primary, would have been charged if not for Emil Bove’s prior statements about how even prosecuting Eric Adams was election interference.

Trump’s other key targets — Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, and Newark Congresswoman LaMonica McIver — all did have official purpose to do what Trump is trying to criminalize. But on top of that official purpose, as all three cases moved to discovery, the accused caught the government in apparent false claims. Dugan, for example, claims that DOJ falsely accused her of sending the undocumented man before her down a stairwell (the more damning alleged facts in the case against Judge Shelly Joseph, whom Trump charged in his first term).

2 On this small detail, Judge Dugan follows the government on one of its forays outside the scope of the indictment. It is undisputed—and indisputable, given the video evidence—that E.F.R. entered the public hallway about 15 feet to the right of the usual courtroom door, where two agents watched him emerge. So Judge Dugan never “optimized” the man’s avoidance of federal agents. Contra Dkt. 46 at 28. On the government’s own witness statements, she certainly never directed E.F.R. “to access a stairwell.” Dkt. 46 at 21. To the contrary, she pointed him to the public hallway. None of this is dispositive now, one way or the other, especially because the magistrate judge found these acts part of a judge’s job, Dkt. 43 at 30, and the government does not dispute that finding. But it begs the question why the government overstates or misstates its evidence.

In the Baraka and McIver case, the sworn affidavit of Ricky Patel in the Baraka case does not match the alleged facts in the McIver indictment — and that’s before you get into the missing Body Cam footage in McIver’s case.

Which is to say that Trump’s DOJ is having to make shit up in their quest to criminalize oversight for immigration enforcement.

Revenge

The criminal case against Ksenia Petrova — the Harvard researcher first detained, then arrested, for bringing frog samples into the country — is unclear. Speedy Trial should have expired on that case.

With Abrego, of course, is it much more clear.  Rather than move Abrego back to the US and initiate a deportation procedure to a third country, they instead immunized and freed people who’ve committed the crime they’re alleging against Abrego. Two judges reviewed the evidence and both found it so flimsy that it didn’t merit detention. Then, after he accused the government of classic vindictive prosecution — the filing of charges because he availed himself of his rights under the Constitution, they tried to coerce him to plead guilty in order to win deportation to Costa Rica instead of Uganda.

That’s why the stakes on Abrego’s case are so high. He is challenging the government’s bid to ratchet up legal jeopardy when anyone fights for their rights. While so many others lay low in hopes they’ll avoid further targeting, Abrego — perhaps out of necessity — has pushed to vindicate rule of law.

Data dives

Meanwhile the head of Fannie and Freddie, Bill Pulte, appears to be trawling through mortgage records to find dodgy paperwork to refer to Trump’s Director of Weaponization, Eagle Ed Martin. Thus far, Pulte has referred Tish James, Adam Schiff, Lisa Cook, and two more unnamed people.

As Abbe Lowell noted in a latter to Martin regarding his stalking of Attorney General James, somehow Pulte missed that Ken Paxton has one more “primary residence” than Pulte claims that his Dem targets do.

This conclusion is supported by your other appointed title, Special Attorney. Whileprofessing to be acting to address “mortgage fraud,” Attorney General Bondi and you have statedthat your targets are Ms. James (Democratic Attorney General of New York) and Adam Schiff(Democratic Senator of California). Notably, absent from your mandate is Kenneth Paxton(Republican Attorney General of Texas). Given that the same news reports raising questions aboutMs. James and Mr. Schiff have reported that, somehow, Mr. Paxton has three different properties that he claims to be his “primary residence,”3 it seems to indicate your title ought really be,“Special Assistant for Mortgage Fraud [Alleged Against Democrats Adverse to President Trump].”

3 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Senate hopeful, claimed 3 homes as his primary residence,Associated Press (July 24, 2025), https://apnews.com/article/paxton-mortgages-trump-primary-residence-homestead-deduction-bd259b6bd122afcaf4f11eac5a3a152e.

One thing that’s missing from all of this, however, is that Ed Martin is the one receiving these referrals, not a competent prosecutor (note, too, that the metadata of an earlier letter Martin sent Lowell showed that Jared Wise, an FBI agent who incited January 6 rioters to kill cops, was the author of the letter).

These are men who stated their job was to name and shame, not prosecute.

Ed Martin described himself at a press conference as the “captain” of the group that is investigating prosecutors who launched past investigations into Trump and his allies.

“There are some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them,” Martin said. “And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed. And that’s a fact. That’s the way things work. And so that’s, that’s how I believe the job operates.”

[snip]

“I will say that the prosecutor’s role, and at this moment in our history, is to make clear what the truth is and to get that out,” Martin said. “It can’t be that the system is stifling the truth from coming out because of some procedure.”
Martin said he would have a “more public-facing” role as director of the Weaponization Working Group.

“When I was asked to switch over here, I was told, you know, this job, you need to be out more and talk about what’s going on. So I think we’ll be a little bit more outward facing in terms of talking about what’s happening,” Martin said.

Trump has now claimed to have fired Cook — in spite of a recent Supreme Court ruling that explicitly said the President can only fire Governors for cause, even though Pulte chose to share the referral with someone who brags that he is not conducting himself according to DOJ guidelines.

The extralegal nature of this is of particular concern. In a matter of ten days, a partisan official offered up a Black woman to target, and Trump responded by firing her without the due process he was afforded.

And I expect that Pulte is just the tip of what will soon become an iceberg. Trump has done completely unprecedented consolidation of government-held data (indeed, there’s a new allegation that DOGE is mishandling Social Security data). So we should expect more such attempts to criminalize Trump’s adversaries as his minions data mine more data.

Counter-investigation

Meanwhile, Trump is trying to find a way to claim those who investigated him are themselves criminals.

To be sure, he has already gutted DOJ and FBI of experience by purging those who worked on Trump’s cases (which by purging the really talented prosecutors, might make it harder to succeed with other edge cases DOJ is pursuing).

But Eagle Ed Martin claims to be search for a way to prosecute Tish James. There are hints that DOJ is trying to pursue people like Liz Cheney.

And rather than concerning himself with Trump’s coddling of Russian and China, Tom Cotton referred Jack Smith to Office of Special Counsel for investigation. According to a NYT report, OSC has not contacted Smith or his team at all (suggesting that under Trade Rep Jamieson Greer, the office is not working according to normal protocol). This may be just another attempt to document dive — beyond what Trump himself attempted — to try to invent conflicts where none exists.

Conspiracy theories

Then there’s the at least third attempt to do what John Durham spent four years attempting to do, but failed — to find some way to claim that the counterintelligence and criminal investigation of Trump in 2016 was itself criminal.

The latest incarnation stems from Tulsi Gabbard’s adoption of an obvious conspiracy theory, one based on provably false claims about the shift in the intelligence review in 2016, the content of the Intelligence Community Assessment, and John Clapper’s view of the Steele dossier briefing to Trump.

Trump is attempting, with shoddier prosecutors, what Durham went to lengths he himself said were criminal himself.

Old news

And then finally there’s the old news — the attempt to mine from prosecution declinations — of Jim Comey under Bill Barr in 2020 and of John Bolton under Merrick Garland sometime in the last four years. Both these investigations attempt to criminalize the men for the same thing Trump was himself charged with: mishandling classified information. They aspire to do so with declination decisions from past prosecutors.

Security clearance

The second area in which Trump is exploiting expansive Executive authority is in security clearances. He started his term by stripping security clearance from any of the 51 spooks who truthfully said that the Hunter Biden hard drive packaged as a laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation. A move to strip the security clearance of anyone in the Big Law firms he targeted is the one aspect of those Executive Orders that might survive on appeal (Trump has appealed all those decisions, on delayed basis). There were select cases of targeting — perhaps most importantly, Mark Zaid, since Zaid is one of the defense attorneys with most experience adjudicating clearance issues. And then in recent weeks, Tulsi started stripping the clearance of top spies based on her conspiracy theories.

The expansiveness of Presidential power on this issue will matter in criminal cases insofar as it prevents someone like John Bolton from enjoining the witch hunt into him.

Previous posts

May 27: The Law, Conspiracism, and Gravity

June 12: Pam Bondi’s Four Political Prosecutions

August 16: LaMonica McIver Prepares to Hoist Todd Blanche with His Own Petard

Dockets

Hannah Dugan docket

Ras Baraka criminal docket

Ras Baraka civil docket

LaMonica McIver docket

David Huerta docket

First Kilmar Abrego civil docket (MD)

Second Kilmar Abrego civil docket (MD)

Kilmar Abrego criminal docket (MDTN)

Ksenia Petrova criminal docket

 

This post contains links to other posts in this series.

I started this series by identifying the major causes of the problems we face with the MAGA movement spawned by Trump and glommed onto like leeches by fascists, Christian Dominionists, White Supremacists, anti-vaxxers, the grifters behind the manosphere and so many other creeps and perverts. In this post I offer a thought on dealing with the filthy rich.

My suggestion is to unlearn the stupid ideas about capitalism that dominate our education system and our political discourse. Replace them with something approximating reality.

Background

Since the beginning of this country, the filthy rich have hated democracy, arguing that the masses would use the power of government to seize their wealth and reduce their power. The filthy rich of the day hated FDR, and worked to destroy his legacy.

As part of that campaign, they linked capitalism to democracy, so that if you didn’t support their views of capitalism, if you even asked questions about it, you were a commie, an enemy of democracy. They became vocal advocates of the simple-minded economics we were all taught in high school and/or college, and spent massive sums to eradicate all alternatives. My first econ course was taught out of Samuelson on Economics, editions of which are still standard in colleges.

I’ve written extensively about this here at Emptywheel. Some of those posts don’t hold up well, but all of them raise substantial questions about the economic theories underlying neoliberal capitalism. Search the site for Jevons, for example. The ideas that underlie marginal utility spring from the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. I hope we’ve all outgrown that.

Of course, there may be some value in the simple models of Econ 101. But all of it is open to question, and all of it requires more justification than “Mankiw said so in his textbook”.

Examples

1. Trickle-down. Surely there is no one left who seriously believes that trickle-down theory has any merit other than as a laugh line. But versions of it are everywhere. Here’s a Bluesky post by Mark Cuban, one of the filthy rich.

Want to use rich people like me to your advantage? Incent us to help those who need it the most. Lower corp taxes for comps that pay a min of $25 per hour. Lower corp taxes if employees get stock at the same pct as the CEO. Bottom up incentives work. Dems never innovate. They bitch

This is a form of trickle-down. Give the filthy rich a tax cut, and the benefits will trickle down to someone. Only, of course, that’s not how things work. Corporations won’t do that unless the benefits outweigh the costs. The tax cuts have to be at least equal to the cost of raising wages. Companies that already pay close to $25 per hour will get a tax cut greater than the cost of raising wages. Companies that pay substantially less won’t raise wages, meaning the worst-paying jobs in the worst industries won’t benefit.

The Chicago Bears don’t like Soldier Field, and want the city to build them a new stadium. They tell us we Chicagoans will benefit from having a new stadium so we should pay for it to encourage them to build it. Well, the Bears owners benefit from being in our city, which is a much greater value. What do they think the TV market looks like in Omaha? The owners are rich. If they were capitalists, they’d build it themselves.

Wages

I wrote a post on the justification for allocation of the profits from business activities. Please read it. It’s a good example of the kind of nonsense smuggled into economic analysis using simple-minded models. The argument from the standard economics text begins by assuming we live in a competitive capitalist system. We don’t. The model fails at the outset.

But worse, it hides the reality that everything in the real world is set up by people who already have power and wealth. Why would such a system benefit anyone other than the people who set it up, except by accident? Consider the enclosure laws which drove people into “dark Satanic Mills”, as William Blake called them in his short 1810 poem Jerusalem.

The Econ 101 model hides the fact that the allocation of income is a political issue, and that workers can and should fight for a bigger share than the mingey allocation authorized by John Bates Clark and his Natural Laws.

Land

Capitalism is built on ownership of private property. Much of English history is bound up in the struggle of aristocrats to hold onto their property against the power of the monarch. Here’s John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, Chapter V, § 32:

But the chief matter of property being now not the fruits of the earth, and the beasts that subsist on it, but the earth itself; as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest; I think it is plain, that property in that too is acquired as the former. As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the common. Nor will it invalidate his right, to say every body else has an equal title to it; and therefore he cannot appropriate, he cannot inclose, without the consent of all his fellow-commoners, all mankind.

Is it that plain? I can see why the usufructs of the land collected by this guy should be his, whether he raised them himself or merely found them. But what is the source of his claim to the earth itself? And why does it survive him and go to his heirs? And why is he allowed to sell it and keep all the money? Locke doesn’t say.

And indeed, it seems plain to me that these questions are obscured by Locke’s assertions. Doubtless it was true of the monarch, because the monarch had armed troops to back him up. But why should it be true now? And whatever the justifications might be, are there no limits?

Here’s one perspective. Our ancestors drove the Native Americans off the land and claimed much of it for the government. The railroads wanted incentives to build out their systems (see trickle-down), so the government gave them a big chunk of the land. Then the railroads sold it. A public resource was turned into cash by the rich. How would Locke explain that? What would be today’s equivalent? Giving leases to oil companies to drill on our national forests? Is that cool?

Conclusion

These are three examples of the simple-minded capitalism that infests our minds. From this kind of tripe, we get ideas about intellectual property in gene sequences, and patents on computer code. Why though? We did it without thinking.

Now it’s time for those of us who can to start thinking about these foundational idea. They were given to us by people like Adam Smith or William Stanley Jevons, as are all our ideas. And mostly they no longer describe reality. When they’re gone, replaced by something better, how can the filthy rich justify their wealth and power?

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Let me throw a minority report opinion at you, based on this video, first released on YouTube two days before the FBI served a dawn warrant on John Bolton’s home:

I doubt former National Security Adviser John Bolton expressed any new personal opinions in the video above with regard to Putin and Russia.

Bolton’s general opinion about Trump’s transactional approach to international relations certainly isn’t new.

But Bolton spent more than 12 minutes airing out his opinions on Trump’s handling of Russia, Ukraine, India-Pakistan, and tariffs.

He also shared his opinion that Trump’s so-called “list of accomplishments” is Trump trying to accrue to obtain a Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump’s handling of the India-Pakistan conflict in May earned an ego-fluffing nomination for a Nobel from Pakistan in June.

US support of Israel’s bombing of Iran in July, supported by Bolton, makes the nomination a joke as does continuing US support of Netanyahu’s genocidal handling of Gaza.

These conflicting approaches to international relations may pose leverage for Putin to pressure Trump on Ukraine, using Trump’s narcissistic desire for a Nobel Peace Prize — a prize former president Jimmy Carter, vice president Al Gore, and the first Black American president Barack Obama have been awarded. Bolton doesn’t make this point but he does say Putin is manipulating Trump.

Bolton’s criticism of Trump isn’t limited to the video above, or his remarks in his 2020 book, In The Room Where It Happened. Bolton has been interviewed by many outlets here and abroad during which his criticisms are laid out and only growing as Trump continues to flog his erratic and transactional foreign policies. Here are a sampling of interviews with Bolton:

John Bolton, whom Trump described as “a very dumb guy”, is worried about Taiwan
60 Minutes Australia, May 4, 2025

Putin Will ‘Take Advantage’ Of Trump Meeting: Fmr. Nat’l. Security Adviser John Bolton
NewsNation via The Hill, August 8, 2025

Trump is in rush to get deal done: John Bolton on Russia-Ukraine talks
Elizabeth Vargas Reports, NewsNation, August 18, 2025

‘Sanctions Don’t Prohibit What India Did’: Ex-Trump NSA John Bolton On U.S. Tariffs On India
Hindustan Times, August 21, 2025

In this excerpt from the Hindustan Times interview above:

10:34 [MATTOO] You know Ambassador Bolton, if I could bring you back to that question of trust uh moving forward in uh the partnership with America. Lots of commentators over the years in India have been skeptical about the relationship with the United States. They’re saying that look this is a country that fundamentally has a lot more leverage than we do. That’s the question you know do you have the cards and the the sense that there is in India is that yes America is willing now to use its leverage in a way that is coercive, is extremely transactional, uh, and is in some ways brutal.

And you’ve seen President Trump speak very appre, in a very appreciatory tone about tariffs, saying that we’re willing to use it time and again for our foreign policy instruments. There’s a sense that defense technology could be something that America uses as well. And for example, our fighter jet uh something like General Electric fighter jet engines which India is co-developing with the United States to use for our fighter jets is something that India took a significant leap of trust in the United States to develop that partnership uh after years and years as you might be familiar with of suspicion about Washington.

What do you think what has happened over the last couple of weeks does to trust in the relationship? And if you’re speaking to an Indian audience as you are now, how do you pitch to them that the American relationship is one that they should still rely on, should still work on, should still continue to develop?

11:45 [BOLTON] Well, unfortunately, what Trump has done on the tariffs generally uh is destroy uh decades of effort with India, but with a lot of other countries as well uh to build up good faith and trust and reliance on the United States and uh it will take time to repair that. That’s that’s the unfortunate reality. But but here’s where I think it’s important to understand that Trump is aberrational. I don’t know anybody else uh Republican or Democrat who ran for president, let’s just say in 2024, who if elected would behave anything like this. Trump’s doing a lot of things domestically in the United States that are cause for great concern for us as well. And I don’t know any other candidate from 2024 who would do that.

12:30 [BOLTON] Uh, Trump doesn’t have a philosophy. Uh so I think ultimately there’s no legacy for him to leave to his successors, whoever they might be. Uh and I believe that the uh the uh the the force of his personality inhibits a lot of people from speaking up, but that doesn’t mean they agree with what he’s doing. That’s very unfortunate in my view.

12:52 [BOLTON] But I think the uh the the the true strategic sense here uh particularly for a country like India with its assets and capabilities and uh and threats that it faces right on its own border uh is is just to take a deep breath and remember that the world’s going to last longer than the next three and a half years. And uh it’s not pleasant to go through this. I’m not not going to try and persuade anybody of that. But uh but our objective should be to keep the damage to the relationship uh at a minimum uh and then to think about how to repair it as quickly as we can thereafter because I think that when Trump walks off the stage uh he will take almost uh the bulk of this history with him.

(emphasis mine)

Bolton calls Trump “aberrational” or an “aberration,” but this is not the only time Bolton has done so. He did so in June 2020 when interviewed by ABC News, in an interview for NPR in August 2023, in March this year in a tweet from his own Xitter account, and in the India Today video (11:52) featured above.

While criticizing Trump and his foreign policy (or lack thereof), Bolton makes a point of calling Trump an aberration so often through so many media outlets that it seems like a campaign slogan.

In the Hindustan Times Bolton also noted Trump’s repression of free speech critical of his geopolitics. Bolton had to know that he would face more aggressive tactics by the Trump administration to squelch his criticism.

But what if this was the point? To egg Trump on with repeated critical comments Bolton knew from experience would hit a nerve with Trump, to goad him into attacking Bolton?

What if Bolton made it — the investigation into him including the raid on his home yesterday — happen on purpose? In other words, a MIHOP gambit?

If so, what are the next moves by Bolton and Trump?

~ ~ ~

During the February 5, 2020 hearing before the House Committee on the Judiciary, there were a couple questions asked of then-FBI Director Chris Wray mentioning John Bolton by name. First, committee chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (D, NY-12):

Chair Nadler. Okay. Now, recent reporting suggests that the
President plans to seek payback against those individuals he
believes crossed him during the impeachment proceedings. I am
sorry to have to ask. Has the President, the Attorney General,
or any other Administration official asked the FBI to open an
investigation into Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, John Bolton, or any
Member of Congress?
Mr. Wray. Mr. Chair, I have assured the Congress and I can
assure the Congress today that the FBI will only open
investigations based on the facts, law, and proper predication.
Chair Nadler. I understand that, and I assume that it is
correct that neither the President, the Attorney General, or
any other Administration official has asked the FBI to open
improper political investigations?
Mr. Wray. No one has asked me to open an investigation
based on anything other than the facts, law, and proper
predication.

Later in the hearing, Rep. Joe Neguse (D, CO-02):

I want to give you an opportunity to clarify earlier part
of your testimony. The Chair had asked a question, and I think
there was some confusion around your answer. So, with respect
to a recent article that alleges that the Administration may be
attempting to initiate political investigations or politically
motivated investigations, rather, into their political
opponents, has the President, the Attorney General, or any
Member of the Administration asked you to initiate an
investigation into John Bolton?
I am not asking whether or not that request would be
improper or proper or whether or not if such a request was
made, if you have initiated such an investigation. I am simply
asking if they have asked you to do so.
Mr. Wray. I understand why you’re asking the question, and
I would just tell you my commitment to doing things by the book
includes not talking about whether any particular investigation
does or does not exist. You shouldn’t read anything into that.
That’s not a hint that anything is happening. It’s just I don’t
think that’s a question that I can responsibly answer if I’m
going to be faithful to my commitment to doing things by the
book.
Mr. Neguse. Well, we appreciate–
Mr. Wray. I will tell you, as I said to the Chair–I will
tell you, as I said to the Chair, that no one has asked me to
open any investigation on anything that’s not consistent with
the facts, the law, and proper predication.
Mr. Neguse. I would just say, Director Wray, with all
respect, as you could probably imagine, these questions, both
the question the Chair posed and the question that I posed, are
not academic or esoteric for us. Seven months ago, Special
Counsel Mueller sat in the same chair that you are in, and we
all know now, that the very next day, the President had his
infamous call with the President of Ukraine, in which he sought
foreign interference in our elections. Of course, as you know,
in just a few hours, the Senate will render judgment in the
impeachment trial of the President.
So, one can ask reasonable questions as we read these
reports that we just over the course of the last few days as to
potentially what other actions this Administration might take.
So, again, I appreciate your earlier answer, and I want to move
on to a different topic, which is election interference.
There was an article just a few weeks ago in the New York
Times, and I would ask for unanimous consent to enter it into
the record. “ `Chaos Is the Point’: Russian Hackers and Trolls
Grow Stealthier in 2020,” by Matthew Rosenberg, Nicole
Perlroth, and David Sanger of the New York Times.
[The information follows:]

MR. NEGUSE FOR THE RECORD

==========================================
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

Mr. Neguse. In the article, there are a couple of
references to new developments in terms of the way in which
Russian actors, the intelligence apparatus is engaging in
disinformation in attempted interference in our elections. I
wonder if you could comment about two in particular? I will
just quote.

“One of the two Russian intelligence units that hacked
into Democrats in 2016, `Fancy Bear,’ has shifted some
of its work to servers based in the United States in an
apparent attempt to thwart the NSA, which is limited to
operating abroad. Also, the trolls at the Internet
Research Agency are trying to exploit a hole in
Facebook’s ban on foreigners buying political ads,
paying American users to hand over personal pages and
setting up offshore bank accounts to cover their
financial tracks.”

I wonder if you could expand in greater detail on both of
those two issues and how the FBI, I guess, is addressing both
of those developments.
Mr. Wray. So, certainly, I appreciate the interest. I think
I’d have to be pretty careful about how much detail I could
provide in an open hearing. I would say that we believe–we
assessed that the Russians continue to engage in malign foreign
influence efforts of the sort that I was describing before–
fake personas, trolls, bots, state-sponsored media, the whole
gamut in the bag of tricks.
We also assessed that just like any sophisticated actor,
that they continue to refine their approach. We saw that from
2016-2018. We’ve seen it from 2018 moving forward. Happily,
we’re refining our approach, too, and we’re trying to stay
ahead of it.

(emphasis mine)

In 2020, during Trump’s first administration, neither the Trump DOJ nor the Democratic Party-led House launched investigations into John Bolton as Trump’s NSA, and in the FBI’s case, did not launch an investigation based on politics into Bolton.

Trump has now overseen a massive purge of intelligence and security personnel, many of whom share one or two things in common: they were involved in investigations in which Trump was a central figure, or they were involved in investigations related to Russia.

How will the Trump administration justify investigating Bolton now when his first administration didn’t appear to have done so? What’s Team Trump’s next move? What about Bolton’s?