It started with the willful destruction of USAID.

I start what is sure to be a kaleidoscopic (or some might call disorganized) reflection on the undercurrents of power as Trump attempts to build a new America based on illusion by reminding that the first assault was on USAID. USAID was targeted, among other reasons, because it supported the kind of pro-democracy NGOs that have haunted Viktor Orbán for years, and also because the realities of aid in the field look funny to those pickled in the provincialism of culture war.

But it’s a useful reminder, because the destruction of USAID was both the first great strike against Congress’ power of the purse (because Marco Rubio was refusing to spend on programs Congress had appropriated, including programs with bipartisan support, like PEPFAR), and also the consensual destruction of a great deal of soft power the United States built up going back to the Cold War. Then, during the Cold War, USAID was recognized as a low-cost way to contest another great power and, along the way, to do something good and maybe even create a few new reliable markets for farmers in the heartland. Now, it had become a symbol of a past hegemony that conspiracy theorists, starting with the richest man in the world, had made suspect.

This reflection will focus on how Stephen Miller’s two-faced war on America’s immigrant diversity and Latin America exists in tension with Trump’s attempt to subjugate both the Democrats and China. I’m attempting to capture these intertwined threads to get to a point I’ve raised before. We know what the decline from democracy to authoritarianism looks like. Trump is overtly following Orbán’s path to competitive authoritarianism. But far too few have considered what it means that Trump is pursuing that model while committing hegemonic suicide.

The willful destruction of USAID laid an important foundation for two “negotiations” that are bedeviling Trump’s effort to consolidate power: the trade war Trump picked with China, and a funding fight with Democrats over whether Congress will be Congress anymore.

Art of the Deal guy is conducting a bunch of “negotiations” right now. Many of them involve levying threats, whether threatening to withdraw government funding, launching frivolous lawsuits, imposing draconian tariffs, or even charging people with fabricated crimes, and in response, extorting bribes, like the free work some white shoe law firms decided to give away or payment for the ballroom that will scar the edifice where the East Wing used to be. For most negotiating partners, such threats leave two choices: suing in an attempt to deem the entire extortion attempt unlawful, or attempting to minimize the extracted tribute through flattery.

But for China and the Democrats it is different. The government of China doesn’t do flattery — not of foreigners, anyway. Plus, China has been preparing for this moment since the last time Trump tried it, in his first term, in part by increasing its own capacity, in part by replacing American suppliers with countries China has been wooing with soft power for years.

And while Democrats have been suing and suing and suing, Trump’s ultimate goal for the minority — whose party currently leads most of the net donor states in the US — is nothing less than subjugation. Trump was happier to negotiate with Hamas than negotiate with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Trump intends to make them, all Democrats, give him the adulation they refuse him.

And so Trump’s negotiating “tactics” for both are similar: a serial ratcheting up of demands, based on the belief that the desired end — subjugation — is the means to win the negotiation. In both cases, this obstinance has instead created vulnerabilities. By pushing China to impose an export control regime not dissimilar to those the US uses, Trump gave China leverage over the Rest of World countries with which China will continue to trade even as Trump shrivels inside his manufactured walls, the countries Trump once wished to peel off from China.

And every time Russ Vought commits another unprecedented Antideficiency Act crime, it proves the Democrats’ point that there can be no negotiations unless that lawlessness ceases.

But when Trump decided that he had to pay military servicemembers, he directly violated congressional statute. It is “by far the most illegal budgetary action he’s taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything,” writes Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress. “The mechanism through which Trump is paying the troops is the most blatant large Antideficiency Act (ADA) violation in US history.”

Trump is taking money from an account specifically earmarked for research, development, testing, and evaluation, and spending it on military pay, which is forbidden by both the Constitution and law (the Antideficiency Act carries a jail sentence of up to two years), and something administration officials publicly promised Congress they would not do. Dave Jamieson reports at HuffPost that Trump is planning a similar process to keep paying ICE and CBP law enforcement.

Even in three votes on paying essential workers, Democrats refused to budge for a bill that ceded any more power to Vought (the end vote was the same as cloture for the continuing resolution has been, but two different Democrats — Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock — voting with Republicans instead of Catherine Cortez Masto and Angus King).

Vought becomes a greater liability as he gleefully cuts things cherished by Republicans, too, like the promise of an easier commute into NYC.

Having failed thus far, Trump is going to withhold emergency funding for SNAP starting this week. Either he believes that Democrats have empathy (or courage) that Republicans don’t, or he forgets that poor people across the country rely on government aid. But he believes that starving families will force Democrats to bow.

Donald Trump is destroying not just the village but broad swaths of the country in his bid to humiliate his two adversaries. He is seeking capitulation to his person rather than any benefits for the United States.

Even as the country remains shut down, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller have become NeoNeoCons.

Trump has reverted to Cold War means, launching a larger covert war based on dubious legal claims, what his buddies call the “Donroe Doctrine,” a name as stupid as the concept.

Mr. Trump’s new directive appears to envision a different approach, focused on U.S. forces directly capturing or killing people involved in the drug trade.

Labeling the cartels as terrorist groups allows the United States “to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever, to target these groups if we have an opportunity to do it,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, said on Thursday in an interview with the Catholic news outlet EWTN. “We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug dealing organizations.”

The use of Special Forces against alleged drug cartels in other countries rests on the same kind of legal chicanery and nested fabrications that went into Stephen Miller’s unlawful deportation of mostly innocent Venezuelans to Bukele’s concentration camp. And even though the B-1 bombers flying off the coast of Venezuela were readily tracked on commercial apps, Trump explicitly denied them. They’re not hiding, though, that they’re sending the ships that have for decades projected power in the Middle East to take out a two-bit dictator in Venezuela.

But that’s not the only bullshit Trump is selling. For example, Trump’s latest cartel designation — of Cartel de los Soles — is of a cartel that (unlike TdA) may not even exist.

While some of US President Donald Trump’s right-wing led allies in South America — Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay — have echoed his designation of “Soles” as a terrorist organization, many have doubts such a group even exists.

Venezuela itself, and neighbor Colombia, insist there is no such thing as “Cartel de los Soles.”

Some experts agree, saying there is no evidence of the existence of an organized group with a defined hierarchy that goes by that name.

[snip]

“There is no such thing, so Maduro can hardly be its boss,” Phil Gunson, an analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank, told AFP of the so-called “Cartel de los Soles.”

[snip]

According to the InSight Crime think tank, the name was ironically coined by Venezuelan media in 1993 after two generals were nabbed for drug trafficking. The sun is a symbol on the military uniform epaulettes of generals in the South American country.

“Rather than a hierarchical organization with Maduro directing drug trafficking strategies, the Cartel of the Suns is more accurately described as a system of corruption wherein military and political officials profit by working with drug traffickers,” InSight Crime said on its website.

Yet that is the sketchy basis on which Stephen Miller has authorized the murder of one after another boat full of unidentified, first in the Caribbean and now in the Pacific.

The Administration’s thinking — starting from Stephen Miller’s goal of using dead Latinos as a propaganda stunt– is insanely childish.

Then there are the senior officials who see Venezuela as a means to project a tough-guy, defender-of-the-homeland image. Stephen Miller views the air strikes as an opportunity to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace, according to one of the White House officials. Vice President J. D. Vance, though often inclined toward isolationism, has pushed the necessity of defending U.S. borders. And Hegseth, who prefers to be known as the war secretary, is seeking a means of projecting military strength in a region where Defense Department planners hope to reassert American primacy. Finally, there’s Trump himself, who wants to score a foreign-policy victory amid frustrations over his inability to end the war in Ukraine. One close ally of the president’s told us that he was also drawn to the chance to take decisive action, as he did with June’s Iran bombings. “He can give the order and watch it explode. It’s clear-cut and simple, and no American gets hurt,” that ally told us.

This is not the Dulles brothers playing chess. It’s a bunch of insecure boys overturning the checkers board because the rules assign the same number of pieces to both sides. But they’re toppling the board while wielding very big weapons and sketchy — or no — targeting data.

Indeed, they look like they’re playing, from the failure to destroy a submersible in open water, leaving two very inconvenient survivors, to the shrapnel strike on the Vice President’s security, to the new propaganda corps made up of Russian useful idiots.

Such buffoonery extends to Miller’s war on Blue cities. For all the untold human damage it has and is causing,  it nevertheless continues to shine in its Butt Cracks and Beer Belly squalor, including in its training dropouts who can’t pass an open book test on the Fourth Amendment.

Like the invasion of Latin America, it feigns root in intelligence, as viewed by the invasion of an entire apartment building on Chicago’s South Shore Drive predicated on the alleged presence of one or at most two Tren de Aragua members, looking just like an apartment invasion John Yoo dreamt up 24 years ago.

[I]n execution, a number of aspects of the raid looks just like what the raid Yoo envisioned two decades ago.

The raid took place in the middle of the night; a warranted search would mandate permissible hours — usually after dawn — when the search could be conducted.

The entire raid was predicated on the presence of (initially) two and in retrospect just a single Tren de Aragua member. But virtually every one was detained while law enforcement searched for active warrants, and 37 people were arrested. With the exception of a few apartments, the entire building was searched, and left in a mess.

[snip]

In other words, this raid looks just like what we would expect if Stephen Miller were applying already-dodgy John Yoo opinions targeting terrorists who really did launch a military style attack on the US, and applied it, instead, against a gang that Miller has lied persistently to turn into something greater than it is.

But mostly, like the make-believe cartel just added to the terrorist list, the predicate for invading Blue cities remains make-believe.

Stephen Miller’s justifications for invading Blue cities is no more based in reality than the latest cartel he invaded on which to hang murderboats and Special Operations invasions.

Miller has fed Trump manufactured propaganda about Oregon. And those on the ground have manufactured false claims. Or, in Oregon, the state informed the Ninth Circuit that a key claim a panel used to overturn Trump appointee Karin Immergut’s injunction on Guard deployment — that much of the Federal Protective Services had had to deploy to Portland, was false: “defendants admitted that 115 FPS officers have never been redeployed to Portland.”

Or in Chicago, the explanation that Greg Bovino contemptuously violated a retraining more with claims of “commercial artillery shell fireworks.” “The statement is a lie,” lawyers for Illinois stated plainly about the claimed use of commercial artillery shell fireworks.

It’s still very much in question whether appellate courts and SCOTUS will permit Trump to invade Blue cities based entirely on propaganda, as Susan Graber asked in her dissent to her colleagues’ decision to allow Trump to invade Oregon (a dissent that noted the vagueness of the now-debunked FPS claim).

We have come to expect a dose of political theater in the political branches, drama designed to rally the base or to rile or intimidate political opponents. We also may expect there a measure of bending—sometimes breaking—the truth. By design of the Founders, the judicial branch stands apart. We rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda. I urge my colleagues on this court to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur. Above all, I ask those who are watching this case unfold to retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.

Steve Vladeck lays out the play of all three Blue states — California, Oregon, and Illinois — challenging Trump’s invasion. Joyce Vance has a great update on the Ninth. And Chris Geidner catalogs all the innocent Americans whose rights are being trampled along the way, with three attempts to get Justice Kavanaugh to answer for the Kavanaugh stops he blessed.

Trump is engaging in a kind of magical realism in both Latin America and the United States, inventing the most transparent, outlandish bullshit to justify military invasions by incompetent dolts of both other countries and Blue states.

And for all his dickwagging about power, both of those campaigns make the United States far weaker.

But all that’s happening against the background of Trump’s intransigence — his demand that, while he conducts these invasions, both China and the Democrats (and more recently, Canada) simply bow before him.

This is one reason I’m especially fascinated by Trump’s treatment of Argentina, an attempt to support their peso long enough to stave off a debacle for Javier Milei in this weekend’s legislative elections. That part succeeded: Milei’s party won more than enough seats to sustain his veto power.

President Javier Milei scored a decisive political win Sunday, strengthening his position in Argentina’s Congress and securing a lifeline for his audacious free-market revolution backed by President Trump.

With nearly 92% of votes counted, Milei’s Freedom Advances party won almost 41% of the national vote, putting it on track to more than double its representation in Congress. That means his party and allies should secure at least one-third of the seats in both chambers—the critical threshold that allows Milei to preserve his veto power and defend his sweeping decrees.

The result, stronger than most polls had predicted, gives Milei fresh political momentum after months of unrest over deep spending cuts and a grinding recession last year. It also shores up his standing with Washington and the International Monetary Fund, which have tied future financial support to the survival of his austerity experiment. Market analysts expect Argentine bonds and the peso to rally when trading opens Monday, reflecting relief that Milei still has political traction.

But at what expense?

The only conceivable way to spin this bailout as a benefit for the US — other than for Scott Bessent’s hedge fund buddies and a right wing populist, like Trump, tainted by corruption problems — is to imagine that this bailout, the cost of which soon may rise to $40 billion, helps shore up US allies on a continent increasingly cultivated by China.

That is, in the same year Trump willfully destroyed USAID (yearly budget, $30 billion for the entire world), the best explanation for spending up to $40 billion bailing out a failed economic ideology is that same purpose: soft power.

For just one country.

In a nice touch, the folks in Treasury who’ve implemented Bessent’s bailout of his hedgie buddies have been instructed not to take and disseminate pictures of the wreck Trump has made of the East Wing.

“As construction proceeds on the White House grounds, employees should refrain from taking and sharing photographs of the grounds, to include the East Wing, without prior approval from the Office of Public Affairs,” a Treasury official wrote on Monday evening in an email to department employees viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

A Treasury Department spokesman said the email was sent to employees because photos could “potentially reveal sensitive items, including security features or confidential structural details.”

But the tone deaf bailout wasn’t enough. Nor was Argentina’s poaching of US soybean markets in China, the final death blow for the US soybean market this year. But in the last week, Trump has signaled he will turn to Argentine beef imports in an attempt to bring sky-high beef prices down.

In an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said: “Currently, Americans consume 12 million metric tons of beef. 10 million, we produce in this country. 2 million, we import. Out of 12 million, [the Argentine quota] would be 20,000 every quarter. This is not a massive influx in the millions of tons I think that some have thought of beef from Argentina.”

But Christian Lovell, an Illinois cattle farmer and the senior director of programs at Farm Action, a nonpartisan farm organization, said: “If Trump goes through with what he outlined, I do believe it’s a betrayal of the American rancher. It’s a feeling that you’re selling us out to a foreign competitor.”

On Wednesday, Trump reacted to the backlash from cattle ranchers.

“The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil,” Trump wrote on social media.

“It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!” he added.

In a statement, Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a trade association for beef producers, said the organization and its members “cannot stand behind the President while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers by importing Argentinian beef in an attempt to influence prices.”

Trump got what he wanted in Argentina, propping up his chainsaw puppet for the next little while.

But in doing so, he made the US far weaker, making China’s leverage over the US even greater.

Trump’s attempts to extend his power by force — to replace American hegemony with personalized coercion — are and will continue to backfire, diluting the power of that coercion.

No one knows what happens after that.

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

Hello, I’m Rayne, and I’m a lapsed Catholic. I fell away from the Church over a period of time, beginning roughly with the Reagan years and the uptick in Christian fundamentalism’s influence on politics.

It didn’t happen all at once but I finally had enough when the Church became little more than a crypto-fascist mouthpiece for right-wing ideology, focusing almost exclusively on anti-abortion efforts instead of what I was taught were Christ’s teachings.

And yet more than 10 years of Catholic catechism shaped my values and morals, underpinning my Democratic identity. In hindsight I don’t think I left the Church so much as it left me.

Perhaps I should have nailed a thesis to the the Church’s doors in protest but when the entire Church has been subsumed by a political movement, it didn’t occur to me as an effective option.

Now we may need to figuratively nail a thesis on fellow American Christian citizens who’ve lost their way. They have forgotten altogether what Christ taught while forcing on us their corrupt vision of a white Christian nation.

If a nation is truly Christian, it’s not identified as white; the supremacy of whiteness is not what Christ taught. It’s certainly not what I was taught.

From Matthew 22:35-39, the New Testament, King James Version:

35 Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,
36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

During catechism, instructors elaborated on how we must love ourselves as we are the Creator’s handiwork; to love God as commanded means loving His works as well.

And loving His works meant to love our fellow humans because they too, were God’s handiworks.

You can see where I’m going, of course. What the Trump administration does is a rejection of what I’ve understood to be God’s commandments.

Not just the top two commandments, but so many other teachings from both the Old and New Testament representing the core of Christianity:

Old Testament

Exodus 12:49
The same law applies both to the native-born and to the foreigner residing among you.

Exodus 22:21
You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Exodus 23:9
Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.

Leviticus 23:22
When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you. I am the LORD your God.

Leviticus 24:22
You are to have the same law for the foreigner and the native-born. I am the LORD your God.

Leviticus 25:35
Now in case a countryman of yours becomes poor and his means with regard to you falter, then you are to sustain him, like a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with you.

Deuteronomy 10:18
He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.

Deuteronomy 10:19
And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.

Deuteronomy 15:7-11
“If there is a poor man with you, one of your brothers, in any of your towns in your land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, nor close your hand from your poor brother;

Deuteronomy 24:14
Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is a fellow Israelite or a foreigner residing in one of your towns.

Deuteronomy 27:19
Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow. Then all the people shall say, “Amen!”

Zechariah 7:10
and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.

New Testament

Matthew 25:35-46
For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’ Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink?

3 John 1:5
Beloved, you are acting faithfully in whatever you accomplish for the brethren, and especially when they are strangers;

James 1:27
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

Galatians 3:28
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Hebrews 13:2
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.

I don’t know how any Christian can have learned these tenets and not objected strenuously to Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and the funding of ICE as his personal anti-immigration militia.

Immigrants are strangers, travelers from foreign lands, asylum seekers looking for aid and justice. Christians haven’t been told to segregate the legal from illegal when it comes to treatment of immigrants; they have been told repeatedly to treat immigrants with kindness and generousity because all humans are ultimately the descendents of immigrants.

I thought of that last verse from Hebrews in particular after learning ICE shot a pastor in the face at the ICE detention facility in Broadview, IL.

(link to video if embedded link above does not play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVKXujeagO0)

I thought of Hebrews 13:2 again when ICE turned away interfaith clerics who came to administer communion to the faithful in detention two weeks ago.

And ICE has been harassing Catholic faithful by menacing them outside Chicago-area churches.

(link to video if embedded link above does not play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFDgzIWvpQA)

It doesn’t matter if Christian clerics representing the faith have appeared to protest ICE’s abuses and Trump’s immigration policies, let alone administer to the faithful. How much closer to an obvious an angel does one have to be for Trump and ICE to halt the perversion of Christ’s teachings these so-called white Christian nationalists are forcing on fellow humans?

It’s obvious Trump would have no compunction about shooting an angel in the face on Fifth Avenue given his administration’s policies and actions.

Even a lapsed Catholic like me finds the Trump adminstration’s behaviors decidedly un-Christian. It makes me think of yet another lesson I learned during catechism:

James 2:14-26
What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. …

Deeds not words. Attacking immigrants is far from demonstrating Christian faith.

I want to talk about some implications of this Annie Karni story, describing the background to what is plain as day: Donald Trump, who jokes in private that he — not Mike Johnson — is the Speaker of the House, runs the nominal Speaker.

Karni pitches the story in terms of Johnson’s “decision” to keep the House on vacation for the entirety of the government shutdown. But it has larger implications of the possibility of peeling Republican Congresspeople away from Trump.

He has argued that the House, which under the Constitution has the sole power to initiate spending legislation, has no reason to meet as long as Senate Democrats are blocking a bill to reopen the government. He has refused to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat who won election a month ago and has sued in federal court to be allowed to take her seat, claiming he lacks the power to do so.

His strategy of indefinite hiatus means that Mr. Johnson has not engaged in the typical political theater that speakers often employ during shutdown fights to jam the party out of power: scheduling tricky votes on bills to reopen parks or pay certain categories of federal workers, like agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection.

[snip]

The absenteeism, people around Mr. Johnson said, is a strategic calculation that the best way to keep his unruly rank and file in line is to place them on an extended leave.

[snip]

Mr. Johnson appears to be using the considerable power of the speakership to render the House irrelevant.

Karni quotes New Gingrich saying that the strategy serves to prevent other issues from “clutter[ing] up” Republican messaging on the shutdown. And while Karni provides an incomplete census of those complaining about this strategy, she doesn’t explain what that other clutter might be.

• Kevin Kiley, who’ll likely be ousted if the CA redistricting passes
• Far right Texan Beth Van Duyne, who thinks they need to come back to work
• Elise Stefanik, who wants to pay the troops
• Steve Bannon, who wants to codify some of what Trump did with EOs

Stefanik’s concern, paying the troops, suggests a potentially much bigger concern, such as that Trump is sending service members into a wildly stupid, illegal war in Venezuela without any legal cover.

Given Johnson’s refusal to swear in Adelita Grijalva, one of those other issues is Epstein.

Johnson’s utter silence on a Trump pardon recipient, Christopher Moynihan, threatening Hakeem Jeffries, and Johnson’s cheerleading for George Santos’ commutation hints at another one: the way that Trump’s corruption fosters crime.

Another thing keeping the House on vacation keeps buried is healthcare, which Karni elsewhere describes as “a political vulnerability for the party.” CNN reports more members getting squeamish about the impending healthcare increases.

And Trump’s selections about what to fund and not to fund — his decision to reopen Farm Services Agency, so it can keep farmers afloat while his trade war kills their markets, but not SNAP, are an attempt to game this process. But thus far he has proven wildly tone deaf about what his members are really exposed to. SNAP may be one such example.

All that’s to say that if members were in town, then they might be pushing back more aggressively against Speaker Mike and through him, Trump.

Trump, though, really is trying to neuter Congress. His demands that Republican state after Republican (or, in the case of North Carolina, swing) state redistrict, effectively eliminating democracy and enshrining polarization at the state level would serve his interest in completely defunding blue states which also happen to pay the bills for red states.

Perhaps most tellingly, Trump says that the Big Ugly Bill (Karni focuses on the tax cut part of it, not the creation of a goon army currently invading blue cities) was the only piece of legislation he needed Congress to pass.

Mr. Trump, [] has an iron grip on congressional Republicans and this week told G.O.P. senators that after they pushed through his marquee tax cut law, “We don’t need to pass any more bills.”

Republicans would do well to consider the implications of this, particularly as Trump and Russ Vought continue to violate funding rules. Congress has funded his army. There’s no reason to believe they’ll be entirely immune from targeting by it, as LaMonica McIver already has been.

This all underscores one reason voters should be focusing on Republicans, not Democrats, in the weeks ahead, as SNAP shuts down and a second DOD paycheck arrives. Because Trump really is proposing he proceed without his Republican members of Congress — or without them serving any real function. And at least some of these Republicans do care (or can be made to care) that Trump is destroying their communities.

Listen on spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

 

Index to posts in this series.

In the last two posts I’ve described several responses to Existential Ambiguity set out in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics Of Ambiguity. In this post, I give some examples, and offer a suggestion for using the Existentialist conception of freedom to argue with Trumpists.

Infantile people. There are few people forced into infantile behavior today. De Beauvoir gives some cringey examples from prior times, women denied any agency from birth, for example.

Sub-men. These are people who close themselves off from their freedom. They merely respond to whatever stimuli move them the most. De Beauvoir says these are the people recruited to do the dirty work of tyranny. Examples include Nazi thugs, the secret police, the torturers and their supervisors, and the people who operated the concentration camps and the gas chambers. An obvious parallel today is the ICE goons terrorizing people around the country.

Serious people. These are people who cling to the structures of belief and rules of behavior handed to them by others. They pretend these are immutable facts rather than human constructions. They surrender to others their power to make moral judgments. This, I think, is the largest group.

I think Adolf Eichmann is a good example, at least the Eichmann Hannah Arendt describes in Eichmann In Jerusalem. He obeys the rules he is handed by the regime, and strives within those structures to carry out his orders and advance his career.

In the same way, all the Good Germans who went along with the entire Nazi project, followed the rules, sacrificed themselves and their children to the war effort, ratted out their Jewish neighbors, ignored the assaults on the Jews and others, didn’t question their own participation in the evil.

We see examples of this everywhere today. Of course we don’t know the precise motivation of Trump voters, but apparently few of them have changed their minds despite his abuses. They do not exercise moral judgment about his attacks on people he doesn’t like, whether it’s John Bolton, James Comey, or a bunch of guys looking for day labor jobs at the Home Depot.

Adventurers. In the last post I discussed Don Juan as an example of an adventurer. As another example, here’s a character describes his father, a businessman, in Trade Me, a novel by the Supreme Court clerk turned novelist Courtney Milan:

There is no end to my father’s ambition. Whatever it is he wants, he lays out a plan and grabs it, and once he has hold of it, the only thing he can think about is the thing that is next on the horizon. P. 209.

Passionate people. One possible example of this is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. From what I know, there is nothing to suggest he had Nazi tendencies or was particularly anti-Semitic. He entered and then left a Jesuit Seminary, studied under one Jew and had an affair with Hannah Arendt, also a Jew. But when the Nazi regime took over, he accepted a position as Rector of a major German university and a few days later joined the Nazi party.

He explained himself in an interview published after his death. He called it a compromise to join the Nazi party to save the university, and said he saw an “awakening” in the rise of the Nazi party that would be good for Germany. There’s more. I read this to say he thought his work was more important than the damage done by joining the Nazis.

My book club read The Director: A Novel by Daniel Kehlmann. It’s historical fiction about the German film director G. W. Pabst. The character Pabst is a solid example of a passionate person. He loses his subjectivity in his drive to direct films, doing horrid things to carry out his cinematic vision. His end is a living version of Mozart’s punishment of Don Juan.

Critics. There aren’t many examples of critics. Perhaps one is Jean-Paul Sartre, who seems to have been convinced that his version of Existentialism was a universal truth. I say this because when Albert Camus published his book The Rebel, Sartre dispatched one of his followers to write a scathing review, claiming that Camus was not a real Existentialist. The vitriol was one major reason for the split between the two.

I note that critics aren’t the same as rabid religious leaders. They are simply serious people who take their tenets to crazed extremes, and seem thrilled to ally themselves with fascists. Thus, cult leaders and the New Apostolic Reformation leaders don’t count.

Discussion

1. I think that de Beauvoir is right: people unwilling to live their freedom are easy prey for tyrants. Some are active supporters, because they think they can hammer people they despise. Some are passive, thinking they’ll prosper under the tyrant’s regime. Some aren’t paying attention.

2. Ever since the shitter-in-chief got elected I’ve hoped that this kind of reading would help me find things I can do to fight fascism. My first hope was that in these older writings there would be hints of things people might have done that would have slowed the rise of fascism. Sadly no.

So my second hope was that I would find tactics that might fight fascism among Trump’s less crazy supporters. I see a couple of things. Polanyi says that when change becomes too rapid, people resist it. Arendt says that the intellectual elites abandoned society to the mob. De Beauvoir says that people who are not fully free are easy marks for tyranny. And always in the back of my mind, C.S Peirce tells us that people become very uncomfortable when they suddenly doubt an idea they’ve held, and this is the only thing that will make them think again.

I tried to imagine using these insights in a conversation with some people I knew pretty well in my Church Choir in Nashville. I think they were sincere Christians, and I’m guessing a lot of them voted for Trump.

I imagine myself talking about immigrants with one of them. I think I’d make two points. First, I’d point to rising costs of food, and blame it on Trump’s sudden attacks on immigrants which has caused rapid changes in agriculture.

Then I’d point to the videos and reports of the vicious treatment of these hard-working people: violently kidnapped, held in appalling conditions, shipped to dangerous lands where they don’t speak the language, and separated from their kids. I’d ask how they reconcile that with the command of Jesus that begins the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).

Jesus tells a lawyer to love his neighbor as himself. The lawyer (of course) asks who is my neighbor. Then Jesus tells the famous story, and asks who is the neighbor of the stricken man. The lawyer correctly answers the foreigner who helps. I know they’d see the point immediately; I must have heard that sermon five times over the years I was a member of that church. I’m sure they’d have some excuse, but they’d know it was fraudulent, which I hope would lead to doubt.

I imagine a lot of people at other churches might respond saying their preachers say otherwise. There’s my opening. Why did you let that preacher tell you what Jesus meant? Perhaps your preacher means well, but the most fundamental tenet of every Protestant group is that the individual has the ability, the right, and the duty to understand the words of the Bible themselves. Why are you afraid to make your own moral judgment and offer your own moral justification?

I think this line of discussion brings out the points I’ve learned from all these books. Would they lead to change? No, at least not in the short run. But it’s something I can do, and it might make a tiny difference before it’s too late..

I suppose I should not have doubted that Abbe Lowell would file a request for relief based on Lindsey Halligan’s stalking of Anna Bower.

I mean, I didn’t doubt it.

But I was impatient. I should also have considered the optimal timing for Lowell to do that: the evening before the arraignment.

What a way for Lindsey Halligan to start out on the wrong foot with Judge Jamar Walker, with both the request to make Lindsey follow the rules on public comment and notice that Attorney General James (as Lowell refers to his client throughout) intends to move — tomorrow — to disqualify Lindsey on a schedule that will coincide with Jim Comey’s parallel attempt.

The request itself makes ample use of the opening Lindsey gave James to mock her inexperience. It refers to her as the “purported interim US Attorney” (or similar) five times.

Although the government sought and filed the indictment in this case on October 9, 2025—signed only by purported interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan—articles issued before the charges were filed indicated that charges would be brought.

What precipitates this motion now is a digital messaging exchange that occurred after the government brought charges, between purported interim U.S. Attorney Halligan and Anna Bower, a senior journalist for Lawfare, published on Monday, October 20, 2025.

[snip]

After confirming Ms. Halligan’s identity, Ms. Bower asked the purported interim U.S. Attorney what she was “getting wrong,” and Ms. Halligan replied: “Honestly, so much. I can’t tell you everything but your reporting in particular is just way off. I had to let you know.”

[snip]

These extrajudicial statements and prejudicial disclosures by any prosecutor, let alone one purporting to be the U.S. Attorney, run afoul of and violate the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the Code of Federal Regulations, this Court’s Local Rules, various rules of ethical and professional responsibility, and DOJ’s Justice Manual.

[snip]

Ms. Halligan’s initiation of contact, and then repeated exchanges, with the journalist—a mere two days after filing charges—appear to have violated several of the above-cited rules and codes of professional conduct. As the purported chief law enforcement officer for this District, as well as the individual who alone presented evidence to the grand jury in Alexandria and signed the two-count indictment of Attorney General James, 12 Ms. Halligan should know that she is prohibited by the federal, local, and Department rules governing extrajudicial statements and media contacts from engaging with a journalist about the substance and merits of a charged criminal case and the purported strength of the evidence put before a grand jury. [my emphasis]

It describes how even someone with absolutely no prosecutorial experience like Lindsey should know basic rules.

No prosecutor is exempt from following those rules, but they should be followed to the letter by anyone trying to lead a prosecutor’s office. Rather than follow DOJ’s rules protecting non-public, sensitive information obtained in connection with a criminal case and investigation from disclosure, Ms. Halligan opted to use an encrypted app to text with a journalist and discuss the case, certain evidence, and her views on the strength of the charges brought, while ignoring any concerns of prejudice to the defendant, a fair trial, and rules against extrajudicial statements and pretrial publicity.

It has been reported that Ms. Halligan has no prosecutorial experience whatsoever. But all federal prosecutors are required to know and follow the rules governing their conduct from their first day on the job, and so any lack of experience cannot excuse their violation. While the oftquoted phrase “the bell cannot be unrung” is true for that which has already occurred, the Court can require the government to follow the law going forward by entering Attorney General James’ requested Order and preventing further disclosures of investigative and case materials, and of statements to the media and public, concerning this case and any parties or witnesses.

It lists the many rules Lindsey broke:

• Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e)
• 28 C.F.R. § 50.2
• A variety of local rules, starting with Local Criminal Rule 57.1, Free Press – Fair Trial Directives
• American Bar Associations Model Rule 3.8, Special Responsibilities of a Prosecutor
• Various parts of the Justice Manual, starting with Justice Manual (JM) 1-7.100

And then there are three footnotes which, as footnotes often do, have the meat of the argument.

Though the body of the motion does not mention Federal Records Act, Footnote 11 notes that Attorney General James will pursue the apparent violation of 44 U.S.C. § 2911 (violations of which require disciplinary action) “with the appropriate offices.”

11 In addition to apparently violating the rules addressed in this section, Ms. Halligan admitted in her exchanges with the journalist to a likely violation of the federal records laws and rules around using unapproved electronic messaging accounts. See 44 U.S.C. § 2911 (restricting officer or employee of an executive agency from sending messages using a non-official electronic messaging account). Ms. Halligan acknowledged she was using an unofficial messaging application, Signal, with its “disappearing messages” feature enabled and set to automatically delete after eight hours. Trying to delete the paper trail of improper communications does not mean they did not occur. For this reason, Attorney General James also asks the Court to order government attorneys and agents involved in this case to follow relevant laws around records retention, and to impose a litigation hold preventing the deletion or destruction of any records or communications having anything to do with the investigation and prosecution of this case. Attorney General James will pursue this apparent violation of the law with the appropriate offices.

As for the grand jury secrecy violations, Footnote 5 notes that a court can prosecute or hold someone in contempt for violating grand jury secrecy.

5 The government can and does prosecute knowing violations of Rule 6(e) pursuant to district courts’ contempt powers under 18 U.S.C. § 401(3), as well as pursuant to multiple felony criminal statutes. See Justice Manual, CRM 156 (observing that disclosure of “grand jury material with the intent to obstruct an ongoing investigation . . . may be prosecuted for obstruction of justice under 18 U.S.C. § 1503,” and that an individual who “improperly disseminates grand jury materials may be prosecuted for the theft of government property under 18 U.S.C. § 641”) (collecting cases).

But, Footnote 6 describes, Attorney General James is not asking for that kind of relief — that is, prosecution.

6 Attorney General James is not at this time formally moving for relief pursuant to FRCrP 6(e).

At least, “not at this time.”

And honestly, Lindsey may not be the real target here. One of the things Lowell requests is a log of all contact between “any government attorney or agent on this case and any member of the news media” on this case.

3. Directing government counsel to create and maintain a log of all contact between any government attorney or agent on this case and any member of the news media or press concerning this case.

Lindsey hasn’t been doing the bulk of that. Eagle Ed Martin has.

And because Lindsey blabbed her mouth, Eagle Ed may, as a result, have to catalog all the times he has leaked about this case.

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

There’s been an uptick this week in reporting on the role of health care subsidies in congressional budget negotiations.

Most Americans worry about health care costs: AP-NORC poll
By ALI SWENSON and LINLEY SANDERS | Updated 1:22 PM EDT, October 21, 2025
https://apnews.com/article/poll-shutdown-health-care-insurance-costs-trump-f0282a0f5bedf3f01172ed3fa0ba4fd2

Health insurance sticker shock begins as shutdown battle over subsidies rages
Many states have shown rising premiums ahead of open enrollment for Affordable Care Act plans. Congress is deadlocked over extending covid-era subsidies that bring costs down.
By Paige Winfield Cunningham | October 22, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/10/22/obamacare-aca-enrollment-price-increases/

Some Americans fear high health insurance premiums if ACA enhanced subsidies expire: ‘Very much a worry’
ACA enhanced premium tax credits are set to expire at the end of the year.
ByMary Kekatos | October 21, 2025, 10:51 AM
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/americans-fear-high-premiums-aca-enhanced-subsidies-expire/story?id=126613026

News media are finally telling us what many of us have already known: Trump’s GOP congressional caucus wants to kill Americans.

There are some GOP moderates who are pressing for some, well, moderation on health care subsidies because their constituents need the assistance.

Republican moderates press leadership on health credit extension
Millions of Americans in red states rely on subsidies to keep insurance costs down
By Sandhya Raman and Jessie Hellmann | October 22, 2025 at 12:36pm
https://rollcall.com/2025/10/22/republican-moderates-press-leadership-on-health-credit-extension/

And these moderates need their seats. Check the last graf of that RollCall article — it’s a who’s who of GOP seats in districts that are flippable.

In other words, the state of health care subsidies may mean control of the House.

Trump refuses to negotiate unless the government shutdown ends, but that means giving up the only leverage Democrats have since the moderate GOP reps have been unable to persuade Trump and the rest of the GOP House caucus to budge.

Meanwhile, reality is doing a number on Americans who rely on health care subsidies, including small business owners:

These kinds of rate increases mean households will be making choices between going without health care insurance or going without paying mortgages, skipping car payments, not making the rent, cutting back on groceries they haven’t already cut because of inflation.

Do the math:

— Median weekly earnings for wage and salary workers = $1196 / week
— Average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the U.S. = $1631 / month
— “The USDA estimates $297–558 for a monthly food budget for one person, $614–963 for a couple, and $996–1,603 for a family of four.” (This number was reported in May 2025 and has surely risen since the underlying source report.)
— Average transportation cost per U.S. household = $819 / month

That’s just the basics and doesn’t include out-of-pocket health care expenses, or any other necessities like clothing. It’s extremely grim for minimum wage workers, and for those whose work fluctuates like freelance writers or seasonal contractors.

There’s almost nothing left or worse after rent and/or health care, and it will be worse in rural areas.

Imagine having to choose between feeding your kids and getting any necessary medication including insulin. Imagine trying to pay for prenatal care let alone delivery of a healthy child, and making the rent. Heaven help you if either you or the child suffer complications before/during/after birth.

For many of us this isn’t a thought experiment. It’s a painful reality. Some of us will have to work even longer to pay for health care, well beyond age 65; some of us are already dealing with this challenge, as Business Insider reports in these slice-of-life stories that tend to blame the victim (ex. Faber shouldn’t have been a farmer).

I’m 82 and earn $16 an hour working at a boat store. I don’t have much saved and can’t retire, but everything will work out.
https://www.businessinsider.com/cant-retire-working-at-80-social-security-minimum-wage-2025-10

A trucker in his late 70s who can’t afford to retire shares the big regret he made decades ago that may have changed his circumstances
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/retirement/a-trucker-in-his-late-70s-who-can-t-afford-to-retire-shares-the-big-regret-he-made-decades-ago-that-may-have-changed-his-circumstances/ar-AA1HKHOP

These folks couldn’t save enough for retirement when health care costs were much lower. Today’s younger workers aren’t able to save much at all, not with inflation chipping away at all their expenses. We’ll be reading bleak stories of elderly who can’t retire for decades.

In essence, Trump and his GOP minions’ death panel have become Dickensian: “If they would rather die, …they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

One might think this is the Trump-GOP’s approach to housing policy; if enough people go bankrupt, into foreclosure, or die, there will be more housing available.

It’s as destructive and thoughtless as taking a wrecking ball without a plan to the East Wing of the White House.

Lindsey Halligan’s ham-handed effort to bully Anna Bower into backing off her coverage of problems with the Tish James’ indictment has not gone unnoticed.

American Oversight just filed a FOIA  for Halligan’s Signal texts.

All messages on the messaging platform Signal and any app that can interfacewith Signal or otherwise borrow its technology sent or received by U.S.Attorney Lindsey Halligan regarding government business.

American Oversight requests that all images, videos, audio recordings, or otherattachments regarding official government business shared via Signal, includingany app that can interface with Signal or otherwise borrow its technology, beproduced in response to this request. To the extent any hyperlinks and/or URLs were shared, American Oversight requests records in a form that display the full URL.

Given that this request is limited to a specific, recent, and readily identifiable documents, American Oversight expects that this request can be processed on the Simple processing track and result in a prompt agency response.

Remember: American Oversight was the organization that sued to preserve Pete Hegseth’s Signal tweets, only to discover many of them were destroyed.

As the NGO noted in a presser, though, Halligan is under additional legal mandate to preserve the texts she sent to Bower: DOJ records retention rules that will become key in the Vindictive Prosecution motions filed against her.

Today, American Oversight launched an investigation into interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s reported use of Signal to communicate with a journalist about the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James — one of President Trump’s perceived political enemies. Halligan, whose status and authority as interim U.S. Attorney are being contested in court, later attempted to retroactively claim her Signal messages to the reporter were off the record. According to reports, she set her messages to automatically delete after eight hours — which, if true, constitutes a clear violation of the Federal Records Act and the Department of Justice’s own records-retention rules requiring the preservation of official communications.

In launching its investigation, the nonpartisan watchdog filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the DOJ seeking Halligan’s Signal communications about government business, as well as related DOJ records concerning her use of the app.

“No one can go ‘off the record’ to avoid following the law, not even someone acting as a powerful interim U.S. Attorney. That Halligan used Signal to discuss government business and configured her messages to automatically delete raises serious concerns that she is actively violating the law and attempting to hide the record of her actions — including that she may have revealed sensitive grand jury information,” said Chioma Chukwu, Executive Director of American Oversight. “What makes this all the more alarming is the context: Halligan appears to have engaged in this conduct while leading prosecutions against the president’s perceived political enemies — heightening concerns that her lawlessness is part of a broader pattern of politicized and unethical behavior within the president’s Justice Department.”

Plus, it’s not like Halligan can claim ignorance of the Federal Records Act. The law was central to the logic of the stolen documents case on which she was a defense attorney for Trump.

I’m still somewhat surprised that neither Patrick Fitzgerald nor Abbe Lowell have filed a preservation order on Halligan. Perhaps they’re just assuming that Halligan’s destruction of these texts will guarantee DOJ’s failure on the Vindictive motions?

Correction: They have not sued for Halligan’s texts, yet; they’ve just filed the lawsuit.

There were two competing letters published yesterday designed to frame Kash Patel’s efforts to frame Democrats with being mean to Donald Trump, for which (the NYT reports) Trump wants to be paid $230 million. They are:

• A letter Lanny Breuer sent to Chuck Grassley, scolding him for the irresponsible way Grassley fearmongered Jack Smith’s analysis of toll records affecting nine or ten members of Congress. (Zoe Tillman wrote about the letter here.)
• A letter Jim Jordan sent to Pam Bondi, effectively recycling debunked Kash Patel claims to support a claim that John Brennan lied about the Intelligence Community Assessment.

I’m a well-established critic of Lanny Breuer, but the letter is substantive and direct. After mocking Josh Hawley’s claim that he was “tapped,” the letter shows how toll records have been used in various other investigations:

• The Robert Hur investigation of Joe Biden.
• Charging documents in five different investigations charged since Kash has become FBI Director.
• In leak investigations, targeting Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and staffers (including Kash Patel).
• The Robert Menendez investigation.

But all that’s just set up for this passage, mocking Kash for his claim, made on Sean Hannity’s show while he was wearing a ridiculous jacket, that Jack Smith was trying to hide his use of toll records in a “lockbox in a vault, and then put that vault in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files.”

[T]here is simply no support for FBI Director Patel’s recent assertion that Mr. Smith hid the toll records information so that “no one would find it,” or that Mr. Smith put the toll records in a “lockbox in a vault, and then put that vault in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files.”9 It is not clear what cyber place in a vault in a lockbox Director Patel is describing, but Mr. Smith’s use of these records is inconsistent with someone who was trying to conceal them. Paragraph 119 of the August 1, 2023 indictment describes some of the calls that were made to U.S. Senators on January 6, 2021, and footnote 132 of Volume 1 of the Special Counsel Report refers to the use of toll records in the investigation. Moreover, the precise records at issue were produced in discovery to President Trump’s personal lawyers, some of whom now serve in senior positions within the Department of Justice.

9 HANNITY: Patel: “We’re Just Warming Up” in Investigation of Alleged Tracking of GOP Senators, Fox News (Oct. 7, 2025), https://www.foxnews.com/video/6382234662112.

Even without this letter, sentient beings were able to point to the place in the indictment and the Jack Smith report where these toll records were described. And, as the letter notes, Trump’s attorneys — including Todd Blanche — got discovery on those toll records years ago, but did not challenge their use in a criminal case.

All this was quite clear to sentient beings. But not the staffers exploiting Chuck Grassley’s diminished capacities to make a stink about something very ordinary.

By comparison, the Jordan letter is shoddy even by his standards.

The ostensible purpose is to refer John Brennan to DOJ (but, significantly, not FBI) for testimony Brennan gave — in a hearing about the letter truthfully saying a bunch of spooks thought the Hunter Biden laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian information op — that mentioned the Steele dossier in passing. This may be an effort to predicate a case in DC after the case in Philly has stalled, but anyone aware of the law would question how comments about the Steele dossier were material to a hearing about the Hunter Biden letter, a point that Brennan even made at the time: “I don’t see any relevance to the Hunter Biden laptop issue now,” as quoted in Jordan’s letter.

More importantly, the letter appears to be an effort to launder debunked propaganda Kash Patel did years ago through Congress back into an investigation led by Kash Patel, something I’ve addressed in the past.

The key paragraph makes a number of claims, some of which are fabrications (and therefore commit the crime that Jim Jordan is referring), others of which are misrepresentations of prior reports that were themselves propaganda.

On January 6, 2017, the CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency published a declassified version of an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) titled Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections. 3 The ICA stated, among other things, that Russia “developed a clear preference” for President Trump and “aspired to help” him win the election.4 This conclusion—now known to be false—was based in part on the Steele dossier, which “was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex.”5 The Steele dossier was a series of reports containing baseless accusations concerning President Trump’s ties to Russia compiled and delivered to the FBI in 2016 by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.6 Subsequent investigations confirmed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid Steele via the law firm Perkins Coie and opposition research firm Fusion GPS to provide derogatory information about Trump’s purported ties to Russia, which resulted in the discredited dossier.7 In July 2025, the Trump Administration declassified numerous documents showing that the ICA’s main findings were false and that the Obama Administration knowingly fabricated the findings for the purpose of undermining the Trump Administration.8

3 OFF. OF THE DIR. OF NAT’L INTEL., ASSESSING RUSSIAN ACTIVITIES AND INTENTIONS IN RECENT US ELECTIONS (Jan. 6, 2017) [hereinafter “Russian Interference ICA”].

4 Id. at 1.

5 MAJORITY STAFF REPORT, H. PERM. SELECT COMM. ON INTEL., 116TH CONG., OVERSIGHT INVESTIGATION & REFERRAL: THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ASSESSMENT (ICA) “RUSSIA’S INFLUENCE CAMPAIGN TARGETING THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,” at 23 (2020) [hereinafter “HPSCI Report”].

6 See JOHN H. DURHAM, U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., OFF. OF SPECIAL COUNS., REPORT ON MATTERS RELATED TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS ARISING OUT OF THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS, at 11-12, 109-117 (2023) [hereinafter “Durham Report”].

7 See id. at 109-117; HPSCI Report, supra note 5, at 22-32; U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., OFF. OF THE INSPECTOR GEN., REVIEW OF FOUR FISA APPLICATIONS AND OTHER ASPECTS OF THE FBI’S CROSSFIRE HURRICANE INVESTIGATION, at v-xii (2019); Memorandum from HPSCI Majority Staff to HPSCI Majority Members, Re: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Jan. 18, 2018).

8 Sarah Bedford & Kaelan Deese, Russiagate definitive timeline: How new intelligence documents fit in, WASH. EXAM’R (July 26, 2025). [my emphasis]

The key claim in here — that what Jordan falsely says is the key claim of 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which he describes as, “that Russia ‘developed a clear preference’ for President Trump and ‘aspired to help’ him win the election,” is based on the Steele dossier — is based off two reports Kash substantially wrote (marked in blue). Never mind that it is only the key claim of the Intelligence Community Assessment if you have the thin skin of a Narcissist, never mind that any dispute is about how much evidence there was before discovering the June 9 meetings or Paul Manafort’s sharing of campaign information with Russian spies. That key claim had nothing to do with the subsequent investigation of Trump, which investigation had already been set into motion by Mike Flynn’s shitty OpSec.

But as I wrote extensively,  the one dated 2020, showing that Congressional Republicans packaged up older claims and Russian spycraft after the Mueller Report definitively showed the Russia did prefer Trump and Trump did welcome that help, is an attempt to create a time machine to go back to the halcyon time before we knew all that.

Jordan, perhaps wisely, doesn’t try to lay out how all this fits together. He outsources it to a right wing propaganda outlet, outsourcing to them their credulity about the time machine effect going on.

Jim Jordan lied, shamelessly, when he alleged that that claim was shown to be false. And he lied, shamelessly, when he said that a report that affirmatively did not incorporate intelligence from the Steele dossier, choosing instead to only link it and specifically say it was not incorporated into analytical work (which backs Brennan, not Jordan), instead relied on the dossier.

This conclusion—now known to be false—was based in part on the Steele dossier, which “was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex.”

If the intimation that Kash Patel’s hand-picked investigators breached Jim Comey’s attorney-client privilege in service of this conspiracy bears out, it only adds to the list of corrupt and possibly illegal things Kash has done in pursuit of this witch hunt. And that’s before you consider all the cops and prosecutors that get fired along the way.

Kash Patel may well be in a race against time. He needs to package up things before Comey gets them all thrown out before Andrew Bailey becomes eligible to act as FBI Director bypassing confirmation, in mid-December.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

 

Since the invasion of an apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore on September 30, in the same week that Trump sent notice to Congress ostensibly authorizing his murderboat strikes in the Caribbean, I haven’t stopped thinking about this John Yoo opinion from October 2001.

It considers the legality of using military forces to combat terrorist threats inside the United States, with an extensive discussion about whether the Fourth Amendment would prevent the military from seizing and securing an entire apartment building — as CBP did in the September 30 raid — and detaining, searching, and interrogating everyone found inside.

The view that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military operations against terrorists makes eminent sense. Consider, for example, a case in which a military commander, authorized to use force domestically, received information that, although credible, did not amount to probable cause, that a terrorist group had concealed a weapon of mass destruction in an apartment building. In order to prevent a disaster in which hundreds or thousands of lives would be lost, the commander should be able to immediately seize and secure the entire building, evacuate and search the premises, and detain, search, and interrogate everyone found inside. If done by the police for ordinary law enforcement purposes, such actions most likely would be held to violate the Fourth Amendment. See Ybarra v. Illinois, 444 U.S. 85 (1979) (Fourth Amendment violated by evidence search of all persons who are found on compact premises subject to search warrant, even when police have a reasonable belief that such persons are connected with drug trafficking and may be concealing contraband). To subject the military to the warrant and probable cause requirement that the courts impose on the police would make essential military operations such as this utterly impossible. If the military are to protect public interests of the highest order, the officer on the scene must be able to “exercise unquestioned command of the situation.” Michigan v. Summers, 452 U.S. 692, 703 (1981).34

34 In a case decided not long after the end of the Civil War, the Supreme Court of Illinois reached similar conclusions. See Johnson v. Jones, 44 III. 142 (1867), 1867 WL 5117. This was an action in trespass brought by an alleged Confederate sympathizer in Illinois who had been arrested and imprisoned in a military fortress, purportedly on the authority of President Lincoln’s orders. The court rejected the defense that the plaintiff had been arrested as a belligerent and held as a prisoner of war. It did, however, state that had the plaintiff been a belligerent, “the order of the President was wholly unnecessary to authorize the arrest. Any soldier has the right, in time of war, to arrest a belligerent engaged in acts of hostility toward the government, and lodge him in the nearest military prison, and to use such force as may be necessary for that purpose – even unto death.” 1867 WL at ‘5. Further, although the court also rejected the defense that the arrest was justified as an exercise of martial law, it also stated that “[i]f a commanding officer finds within his lines a person, whether citizen or alien, giving aid or information to the enemy, be can arrest and detain him so long as may be necessary for the security or success of his army. He can do this under the same necessity which will justify him, when an emergency requires it, in seizing or destroying the private property’ of a citizen.” Id. at *7. In terrorist wars, unlike conventional warfare, there are of course no battle lines, and the theater of operations may well be in heavily populated urban settings. We think, however, that the same principle applies, and that a military commander operating in such a theater has the same emergency powers of arrest and detention.

As far as I’m aware, the memo was only used as an interim thought piece in 2001.

Rather than using the memo to seize entire office buildings, I believe it served as a basis to seize entire data streams and scanning all of it to search for “terrorist” content.

But the example Yoo envisioned years ago is not far off what we saw on September 30.

While subsequent reporting suggests that the raid arose out of a tip that the slum landlord who owns the building gave to the FBI (meaning, they used CBP as a means to clear the building they had refused to pay to secure), in execution, a number of aspects of the raid looks just like what the raid Yoo envisioned two decades ago.

The raid took place in the middle of the night; a warranted search would mandate permissible hours — usually after dawn — when the search could be conducted.

The entire raid was predicated on the presence of (initially) two and in retrospect just a single Tren de Aragua member. But virtually every one was detained while law enforcement searched for active warrants, and 37 people were arrested. With the exception of a few apartments, the entire building was searched, and left in a mess.

Federal agents pounded on the door of his South Shore apartment about 2 a.m. Tuesday.

“I told them they must have the wrong apartment,” the man said.

But armed agents busted open many doors after arriving in U-Haul trucks to raid the 130-unit apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. They woke up residents to handcuff them with zip ties and led them into unmarked vans.

Rodrick Johnson, a U.S. citizen, said he heard “people dropping on the roof” before FBI agents kicked in his door. He was stuffed inside a van with his neighbors for what felt like several hours until agents told them the building was clear, he said.

“They didn’t tell me why I was being detained,” Johnson said. “They left people’s doors open, firearms, money, whatever, right there in the open.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said federal agencies arrested at least 37 people in the operation at the building, which they claimed is frequented by members of Venezulan gang Tren de Aragua. About 300 federal agents, some landing on the roof from helicopters, descended upon the building, according to NewsNation, which was invited along for the operation.

The report didn’t mention women and children appear to be among the detained, said Brandon Lee, a spokesman with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Organizers worry many people were taken without warrants.

“These were families with their children escorted out in the middle of the night,” Lee said. “This administration is using PR efforts to try to turn communities against their neighbors.”

Residents said the building had become home to Venezuelan migrants. The raid saw people’s apartments turned upside down, citizens held for hours and their neighbors taken away to unknown places. Belongings were stolen from apartments after the agents left the building open.

In other words, this raid looks just like what we would expect if Stephen Miller were applying already-dodgy John Yoo opinions targeting terrorists who really did launch a military style attack on the US, and applied it, instead, against a gang that Miller has lied persistently to turn into something greater than it is.

And if that doesn’t already terrify you, much of the rest of the opinion addresses the kinds of things Miller openly fever dreams about, such as the subjection of “loyal citizens, or persons who though believed to be disloyal have not acted overtly against the government, to deprivations that would under ordinary circumstances be illegal.”

State and federal court decisions reviewing the deployment of military force domestically by State Governors to quell civil disorder and to protect the public from violent attack have repeatedly noted that the constitutional protections of the Bill of Rights do not apply to military operations in the same way that they apply to peacetime law enforcement activities. Thus, the courts have explained that “[w]ar has exigencies that cannot readily be enumerated or described, which may render it necessary for a commanding officer to subject loyal citizens, or persons who though believed to be disloyal have not acted overtly against the government, to deprivations that would under ordinary circumstances be illegal.” Commonwealth ex rel. Wadsworth v. Shortall, 55 A. 952, 955 (Pa. 1903) (holding that in time of domestic disorder the shooting by a sentry of an approaching man who would not halt was not illegal). “[W]hatever force is requisite for the defense of the community or of individuals is also lawful. The principle runs through civil life, and has a twofold application in war – externally against the enemy, and internally as a justification for acts that are necessary for the common defense, however subversive they may be of rights which in the ordinary course of events are inviolable.” Hatfield, 81 S.E. at 537 (internal quotations omitted) (upholding the Governor’s seizure of a newspaper printing press during a time of domestic insurrection).35

Our view that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military operations receives support from federal court cases involving the destruction of property. In a line of cases arising from several wars, the federal courts have upheld the authority of the Government, acting under the imperative military necessity, to destroy property even when it belongs to United States citizens and even when the action occurs on American soil. Such destruction of property might constitute a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, the courts have held, even if such seizures might otherwise constitute “takings” under the Fifth Amendment, the exigent circumstances in which they occurred absolve the Government from liability. The cases articulate a general rule that “the government cannot be charged for injuries to, or destruction of, private property caused by military operations of armies in the field.” United States v. Pacific R.R. Co., 120 U.S. 227, 239 (1887)” Although these decisions arise under the Fifth Amendment rather than the Fourth, we think that they illuminate the Government’s ability to “search” and “seize” even innocent United States persons and their property for reasons of overriding military necessity. For if wartime necessity justifies the Government’s decision to destroy property, it certainly must also permit the Government to temporarily search and seize it.

35 See also Powers Mercantile Co., 7 F. Supp. at 868 (upholding the seizure of a factory to prevent a violent attack by a mob and noting that “[u]nder military rule, constitutional rights of individuals must give way to the necessities of the situation; and the deprivation of such rights, made necessary in order to restore the community to order under the law, cannot be made the basis for injunction or redress”); Swope, 28 P.2d at 7 (upholding the seizure and detention of a suspected fomenter of domestic insurrection by the “military arm of the government,” noting that “there is no limit [to the executive’s power to safeguard public order] but the necessities and exigency of the situation” and that “in this respect there is no difference between a public war and domestic insurrection”) (emphasis added) (quotations and citation omitted); In re Moyer, 85 P. 190, 193 (Colo. 1904) (“The arrest and detention of an insurrectionist, either actually engaged in acts of violence or in aiding and abetting other to commit such acts, violates none of his constitutional rights.”); In re Boyle, 57 P. 706, 707 (Idaho 1899) (upholding the seizure and detention of a suspected rebel during time of domestic disorder).

36 See also Heflebower v. United States, 21 Ct. Cl. 228, 237-38 (1886) (“There is a distinction to be drawn between property used for Government purposes and property destroyed for the public safety. . . . [I]f the taking, using, or occupying was in the nature of destruction for the general welfare or incident to the inevitable ravages of war, such as the march of troops, the conflict of armies, the destruction of supplies, and whether brought about by casualty or authority, and whether on hostile or national territory, the loss, in the absence of positive legislation, must be borne by him on whom it falls, and no obligation to pay can be imputed to the Government.”).

We don’t yet know the full extent of justification for the abuses CBP engaged in on September 30. While I don’t follow the Chicago docket as closely as many, I’ve seen no more than two people who might have been arrested in the raid, and that off a warrant in another state.

Which is to say, we don’t yet know precisely what CBP imagined they were doing in the apartment building. We only know that it looks like Stephen Miller adopted one of John Yoo’s discredited bad ideas and tested it in practice.