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Trump Has No Policy Process, Just Wormtongue and Palace Intrigue

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The last paragraph of this NYT story describing absolutely insane plans for the State Department -“eliminating almost all of its Africa operations,” “cutting offices … that address climate change[,] refugee issues, … democracy[,] and human rights concerns,” mandating use of AI for “‘policy development and review’ and ‘operational planning’,” and replacing the Foreign Service exam with loyalty oaths — describes that the Executive Order laying out those plans is not the only proposed plan out there.

It links this story, published by NYT five days earlier, describing more modest plans: closing six embassies in Africa, not the entire continent.

The Trump administration is considering plans to close 10 embassies and 17 consulates and reduce or consolidate the staff of several other foreign missions, according to an internal State Department memo viewed by The New York Times.

The closures and other reductions outlined in the document, which is undated, would pare back the American presence on nearly every continent. They represent an expansion of plans the Trump administration was working on earlier this year for closing a dozen foreign missions and laying off local staff who work in those locations.

The cuts are in keeping with President Trump’s plans to reduce federal spending across the government, as well as a proposal that State Department leaders have been considering to cut nearly 50 percent of the department’s spending.

But the new proposed reductions have raised fresh concerns that the United States will be ceding vital diplomatic space to China, including in areas of the world where Washington has a greater presence than Beijing, compromising American national security, including intelligence gathering.

The competing plans — one a memo, the other an Executive Order that would be signed by Trump and would therefore oblige memo-writers to defer to Trump’s order — comes in the wake of the ouster of Pete Marocco, the Jan6er who effectuated the destruction of USAID, from the State Department.

There are several versions of Marocco’s ouster and his fate, but this Politico story describes that Marco Rubio fired him, in part because of differing opinions about how to destroy USAID (which has long since been accomplished, but during which, Rubio repeatedly made claims about GOP-supported programs like PEPFAR that turned out to be false).

Peter Marocco, the Trump administration official in charge of dismantling USAID, left a meeting at the White House last week to return to his office at the State Department. But when he arrived, Marocco could not enter the building: security told him he was no longer an employee there, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Word of Marocco’s firing quickly tore through the Republican Party and MAGA ecosystem, startling President Donald Trump’s loyalists who viewed the aide as part of an elite cohort of administration true believers. Loud voices on the right piled on Secretary of State Marco Rubio, accusing him of undermining their disruptive agenda.

Yet Marocco’s abrupt termination, which has not been fully reported until now, was not an impulsive dismissal or a case of Rubio going rogue. This report was based on conversations with five people, including administration officials and allies, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters. Four of the people said Rubio fired Marocco. They gave varying explanations: one administration official said Rubio and others wanted Marocco out due to what they saw as his bulldozer operating style and failure to work effectively with colleagues; others pointed to substantive disagreements between Rubio and Marocco over how to dismantle USAID. Meanwhile, Marocco allies viewed Rubio and his team as insular, controlling and obstructionist to the DOGE agenda ordered by the president.

One White House official said Rubio went to a senior White House aide for clearance to remove Marocco after tensions reached a boiling point last week. They described Marocco’s firing as “the first MAGA world killing from inside the White House.”

It also describes the backlash targeting Rubio that has resulted.

In the days since his ouster, Marocco’s MAGA allies have come to his defense and raised new suspicions of Rubio, including questions about why he would want to protect USAID and whether he’s loyal to the president.

[snip]

“He’s really not a MAGA guy, he’s a neocon,” a Trump ally said of Rubio, adding that this move “is gonna bite him.”

This is the third instance of an ugly cabinet-level dispute in the Trump Administration in recent weeks.

NYT’s account of Gary Shapley’s installment to head the IRS, without Scott Bessent’s involvement, followed by his removal at the hands of Bessent, incorporates several pieces of intrigue. First, there’s Shapley’s installment by Musk and then Bessent’s reversal of Musk’s plot.

Mr. Bessent had complained to Mr. Trump this week that Mr. Musk had done an end run around him to get Mr. Shapley installed as the interim head of the I.R.S., even though the tax collection agency reports to Mr. Bessent, the people familiar with the situation said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The clash was the latest instance of Mr. Musk’s influence in the Trump administration that has alarmed top officials. It was also the latest upheaval at the tax agency, with much of its staff pushed out or quitting. Mr. Trump earlier this week called for the I.R.S. to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after the school refused to impose sweeping changes demanded by the administration.

An I.R.S. spokeswoman declined to comment on the leadership changes.

Mr. Shapley, a longtime I.R.S. agent, gained fame among conservatives after he claimed that the Justice Department had slow-walked its investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes.

Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency pushed Mr. Shapley’s appointment through White House channels, but Mr. Bessent was not consulted or asked for his blessing, according to those with knowledge of the dynamic. Mr. Bessent then got Mr. Trump’s approval to unwind the decision within days, they said. Mr. Shapley had been working from the I.R.S. commissioner’s office as late as Friday morning.

Then, there’s Musk’s magnification of Laura Loomer’s attack on Bessent in response.

The feud between Mr. Musk and Mr. Bessent went public late Thursday night, when Mr. Musk amplified a social media post from the far-right researcher Laura Loomer accusing Mr. Bessent of colluding with a “Trump hater.”

“Troubling,” Mr. Musk wrote about Mr. Bessent’s meeting John Hope Bryant, the chief executive of the nonprofit Operation HOPE. Mr. Bryant is working on a financial literacy effort with Treasury officials.

Ms. Loomer had called that meeting a “vetting failure.”

Finally, there’s an oblique comment about DOGE boy Gavin Kliger’s removal on the same day as Shapley, one that WaPo describes in more detail: Kliger was shut out of IRS systems just as he was about to start a purge of IRS employees in the middle of tax season.

Early Friday morning, the IRS rescinded building and systems access for DOGE official Gavin Kliger, according to the people familiar with the situation. The Post could not immediately confirm the reason for the revocation.

Kliger was managing the massive layoffs at the agency that could cut the tax agency’s headcount by 25 percent. More layoff notices had been planned for Friday afternoon, the people said, but those notifications have been paused.

As laid out in declarations from USAID workers, Kliger left his digital fingerprints all over Marocco’s dismantling of USAID.

Left unsaid is whether Musk installed Shapley so as to empower Kliger to destroy the IRS just as it sets to processing this year’s tax receipts.

Thus far, we have correlation, without any insight into causation.

The far right targeting of Bessent is of particular concern, given the evidence he’s holding together the US (and with it, the global) economy with his own shoestrings. WSJ reported this week that he and Howard Lutnick had to sneak into the Oval Office to override Peter Navarro’s disastrous tariff plans.

On April 9, financial markets were going haywire. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wanted President Trump to put a pause on his aggressive global tariff plan. But there was a big obstacle: Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariff-loving trade adviser, who was constantly hovering around the Oval Office.

Navarro isn’t one to back down during policy debates and had stridently urged Trump to keep tariffs in place, even as corporate chieftains and other advisers urged him to relent. And Navarro had been regularly around the Oval Office since Trump’s “Liberation Day” event.

So that morning, when Navarro was scheduled to meet with economic adviser Kevin Hassett in a different part of the White House, Bessent and Lutnick made their move, according to multiple people familiar with the intervention.

They rushed to the Oval Office to see Trump and propose a pause on some of the tariffs—without Navarro there to argue or push back. They knew they had a tight window. The meeting with Bessent and Lutnick wasn’t on Trump’s schedule.

The two men convinced Trump of the strategy to pause some of the tariffs and to announce it immediately to calm the markets. They stayed until Trump tapped out a Truth Social post, which surprised Navarro, according to one of the people familiar with the episode. Bessent and press secretary Karoline Leavitt almost immediately went to the cameras outside the White House to make a public announcement.

And multiple outlets have described Bessent’s thus far successful efforts to prevent Trump from firing Jerome Powell.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly cautioned White House officials that any attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell would risk destabilizing financial markets, according to two people close to the White House granted anonymity to share details of private discussions.

Bessent’s private message reinforces what President Donald Trump already knows but comes as the president’s anger with the Fed chair is growing because Powell hasn’t shown signs that he will cut interest rates soon. It also comes against the backdrop of widespread market turmoil over the administration’s far-reaching trade war.

Trump’s fury with Powell burst into public view on Thursday morning, when he said in a post on Truth Social that his “termination cannot come fast enough!”

But Powell’s job looks safe for now.

Bessent is a mediocre Treasury Secretary, in no way the match for his counterparts. Yet he is increasingly all that’s standing between Trump and his most feverish nutjobs and far bigger financial catastrophe.

Given Loomer’s success firing NSA Director Timothy Haugh and six NSC staffers, it may be only a matter of time before the nutjobs get to Bessent, too.

The third cabinet level blowup is more opaque. As laid out here, three of Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s top aides were escorted out of the Pentagon in the wake of a leak investigation. Politico reported that they were fired — passive voice — on Friday, but the guy who led the investigation used to explain their ouster is also leaving his current role.

Joe Kasper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff will leave his role in the coming days for a new position at the agency, according to a senior administration official, amid a week of turmoil for the Pentagon.

Senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, were placed on leave this week in an ongoing leak probe. All three were terminated on Friday, according to three people familiar with the matter, who, like others, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

[snip]

Two of the people said Carroll and Selnick plan to sue for wrongful termination. The Pentagon did not respond to a request of comment.

Kasper had requested an investigation into Pentagon leaks in March, which included military operational plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, Musk’s visit and a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine.

But some at the Pentagon also started to notice a rivalry between Kasper and the fired advisers.

“Joe didn’t like those guys,” said one defense official. “They all have different styles. They just didn’t get along. It was a personality clash.”

The changes will leave Hegseth without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior adviser in his front office.

“There is a complete meltdown in the building, and this is really reflecting on the secretary’s leadership,” said a senior defense official. “Pete Hegseth has surrounded himself with some people who don’t have his interests at heart.” [my emphasis]

Some of those targeted — who have long-standing ties to Hegseth, going back to his failed non-profit management — are denying any role in leaks.

Whatever the genesis of this upheaval or the partisan explanation for it, it leaves a wildly unqualified man at the top of the world’s largest military with no top aides.

There are other signs of the collapse of all management inside the White House — such as the White House attempt to explain away their attack on Harvard with a bullshit claim that they accidentally sent out a letter demanding to effectively take over Harvard University.

Everywhere you look you have to wonder whether Susie Wiles is as much in charge as Amy Gleason is at DOGE, whether her title of Chief of Staff is just a convenient fiction to cover up for the reality that Trump does whatever the last person in the room tells him to do.

And often as not, the last person in the room is Stephen Miller.

We’ve already seen that the three cabinet secretaries struggling to assert control over their own agencies deferred to Stephen Miller when he told the participants of the famous Signal chat what Trump thought.

That is, it’s not just that Stephen Miller is often the last one in the room with Trump. It’s not just that Stephen Miller’s policy ideas are batshit insane (and that he’s the author of Trump’s most egregious abuses of power). It’s also that Miller often stands in as the Word of DOGE, the Word of Trump.

Kremlinologists are pointing to evidence — his demotion at Trump’s most recent cabinet meeting, for example — that Elon’s power at the White House has started to wane (while ignoring that Elon has moved onto the next phase of takeover, cashing in, cashing in, and cashing in).

But behind all the intrigue, Stephen Miller’s ascendance remains, apparently uncontested and possibly unbound.

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Trump’s Individual Claims about Immigrant Targets Are False–But So Is the Larger Premise

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There are a slew of legal challenges to Trump’s war on immigrants: there are people illegally sent to Nayib Bukele’s concentration camp, most notably Kilmar Abrego Garcia (whom Chris Van Hollen managed to meet yesterday); people sent to CECOT with no due process (including people with pending asylum claims and others picked up by mistake); grad students targeted for free speech; grad students targeted for low-level run-ins with the law; a US-born citizen, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, detained for unlawful entry but since released; and at least three US citizens informed they must self-deport within seven days because their parole had been withdrawn.

Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos is a fairly unique case. He was arrested to great fanfare in March, with Pam Bondi boasting over and over she had caught one of the top leaders of MS-13.

He was arrested not — as Bondi suggested — based off probable cause he was the top leader of MS-13. Rather, he was arrested based on an outstanding administrative immigration warrant and weapons purportedly found in a plain view search of his house, for which he was charged with possession of a firearm by an alien.

9. After knocking and announcing their presence to no avail, members of the FBI’s Special Weapons and Tactics (“SWAT”) Team breached the front and rear doors of the residence. After breaching the front door, SWAT agents observed VILLATORO in an alcove leading to the residence’s garage. VILLATORO ducked behind a small wall out of view and did not comply with the agents’ demands that he exit the residence. After agents deployed a stun grenade, VILLATORO eventually came close enough to the front door to be pulled out of the residence.

10. VILLATORO was taken into custody on an outstanding administrative immigration warrant. When VILLATORO was being prepared for transport from the residence, he confirmed that the bedroom in the garage was his room and that a jacket inside that room was his.

11. FBI agents and TFOs proceeded to search the residence. Inside the aforementioned garage bedroom, a Taurus, model G2C, 9-millimeter handgun bearing serial no. ACH119455 was observed in plain view on a shelf near the bed. Based on my training and experience, I am aware that Taurus firearms are not manufactured in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Furthermore, the words “TAURUS ARMAS MADE IN BRAZIL” are stamped into the handgun’s slide next to the serial number.

12. In that same garage bedroom, agents located three additional firearms, ammunition, and two suppressors.

Less than two weeks later, DOJ moved to dismiss the case against Villatoro. They moved to get rid of the case, their claims, and Villatoro himself the easy way, by quick and due process-free deportation.

On Tuesday, magistrate judge William Fitzpatrick granted DOJ’s request (without requiring DOJ to offer the reason to dismiss), but granted a continuance to provide Villatoro a way to challenge deportation to CECOT.

Yesterday, Fitzpatrick granted Villatoro’s request for a stay so he can appeal the dismissal and try to stave off deportation to CECOT.

Villatoro’s request for an emergency stay cited the effect that the evidence-free claims that Pam Bondi, among others, has made — just like she has been with Abrego Garcia.

Through its very public pronouncements and attacks on Mr. Villatoro Santos, including bellicose statements by the Attorney General, the FBI Director, the Virginia Governor, and President Trump himself, the Government has effectively placed a target on Mr. Villatoro’s back: if he were to be deported to El Salvador, there is no doubt he will immediately be detained at CECOT without trial, and there will be no way out from there. And to be clear, this life-altering fate would result from the unproven allegations of a government that chose to forego criminal prosecution, where there is due process and a burden of proof to meet, in favor of deportation to a country in which there is little to no respect for the rule of law. Mr. Villatoro Santos faces the risk of an effective life sentence without trial, or worse.

If Abrego Garcia is ever brought back to the country, Pam Bondi’s inflammatory allegations against him may limit the government’s ability to dictate his fate; she obviously has prejudiced his ability to get a fair hearing. But Villatoro (who has not contested he had the guns) is in the country and so may be able to make something of the way Bondi claimed him to be something he’s probably not.

It’s not just that Trump’s Administration is deporting people without due process. He’s deporting people without due process because he needs to sustain false claims about them, to sustain a myth about invasion that Stephen Miller used to get Trump elected.

Meanwhile, Trump’s false claims are collapsing at a more significant level.

On one level, there’s Bukele’s claims to oppose MS-13. As I noted here, there has been isolated reporting on Bukele’s interest in preventing the real story of his relationship with MS-13 from being made public.

Asha Rangappa updates that with a description of how both Bukele and Trump have the need to claim their relationship with MS-13 is something it is not.

El Salvador has suffered from gang violence, led by Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, following decades of civil war from 1979 to 1992. According to an indictment brought by the Eastern District of New York against thirteen MS-13 gang members in 2022, various El Salvadoran administrations since the war ended entered into a “truce” with MS-13, in which the gang agreed to reduce homicides in the city “in exchange for transfers to less secure prisons, improved prison conditions, conjugal visits, cash payments, and other benefits and privileges.” The “truce” came to a halt, however, in 2015 after the U.S. government, which wanted to curb MS-13’s activity in the United States and bring them to justice here, increased pressure on El Salvador to return to restrictive prison conditions for gang members and extradite some of them to the U.S. In retaliation for the “truce” being lifted, MS-13 increased its violence both in El Salvador and in the U.S. In fact, the first Trump Justice Department created a task force, called Task Force Vulcan, to crack down on MS-13 in the U.S. – which is what led to the federal indictment noted earlier.

Enter Bukele. Bukele was elected in 2019, winning on a platform that promised to (once again) “crack down” on gang violence. But his party, Nuevas Ideas, began secretly working to gain the support of a critical group: Yep, MS-13. Bukele and his party negotiated with the gang to bring back the “truce,” which would include (according to the federal indictment) “financial benefits, control of territory, the ability to run the gang from prison, and the early release of gang members.” MS-13 also wanted assurance that they wouldn’t be extradited to the U.S., where they would face more punitive measures. (Having studied the drug cartels in Colombia, this was reminiscent of Pablo Escobar’s mantra, “Mejor una tumba en Colombia, que una carcel in los Estados Unidos” – which means, “Better a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the United States.”) The same day Bukele’s party received a legislative majority in 2021, it removed the Attorney General and five members of the Supreme Court who had been working with the U.S. to take real action against MS-13. Buekele also released a major MS-13 leader whom the U.S. was seeking for extradition from prison.

In exchange, MS-13 “agreed to reduce the number of public murders in El Salvador, which politically benefitted the government, by creating the perception that the government was reducing the murder rate.” Indeed, Bukele’s popularity is the result of his so-called “Territorial Control Plan,” which involved building his supermax prison and his plan of mass incarceration – a plan which he credits for the drop in violence since he took office. Of course, the citizens of El Salvador aren’t privy to the secret negotiations Bukele made with MS-13 – details that were going to be made public when the U.S. government’s case against the MS-13 defendants went to trial. Which may explain why the Trump administration quietly dropped these charges last week and put the charged MS-13 members on the third plane bound for El Slavador (and which included Abrego Garcia). Among the defendants was one of the highest-ranking leaders of MS-13, Cesar Humberto Lopez-Larios, who was arrested last June and added to the earlier indictment (and who almost certainly will not face real punishment in El Salvador). A former FBI agent who spent years working on this and other gang cases called it “a historical loss,” especially in terms of getting critical intelligence about MS-13’s operations and members in the United States.

In short, both Trump and Bukele appear to be complicit in a plan to allow MS-13 to operate in El Salvador on its own terms, in exchange for making it look like both are “cracking down” on the gang in their respective countries. Of course, the fact that MS-13 will continue to operate in cahoots with the El Salvadoran government means that citizens of that country who are victims of the gang will continue fleeing to the United States, undercutting the Trump administration’s claim that it is trying to end the “invasion” of asylum seekers. Then again, Trump needs a steady influx of people to continue trying to cross the border in order to keep claiming the “national emergency” he is using to expand his authority.

There’s a flip side to Trump’s propaganda, involving Trump’s false claims about Tren de Aragua.

Even at the Global Threats Hearings on March 26, otherwise focused on Mike Waltz’ Signal chat, Democrats asked Tulsi Gabbard why Tren de Aragua, which Trump had just declared was invading the country in a matter akin to war, was not even mentioned among the IC’s description — prioritized as the primary threat for the first time — of transnational actors threatening the country.

Western Hemisphere-based TCOs and terrorists involved in illicit drug production and trafficking bound for the United States endanger the health and safety of millions of Americans and contribute to regional instability. Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids remain the most lethal drugs trafficked into the United States, causing more than 52,000 U.S. deaths in a 12-month period ending in October 2024. This represents a nearly 33 percent decrease in synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths compared to the same reporting time frame the previous year, according to CDC provisional data, and may be because of the availability and accessibility of naloxone.

Mexico-based TCOs—including the Sinaloa Cartel and the New Generation Jalisco Cartel—remain the dominant producers and suppliers of illicit drugs, including fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, and South American-sourced cocaine, for the U.S. market. Last year, official points of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border were the main entry point for illicit drugs, often concealed in passenger vehicles and tractor trailers. However, some TCOs likely will at least temporarily change their smuggling techniques and routes in response to increased U.S. security force presence at the border.

Since at least 2020, the growth of Mexico-based independent fentanyl producers—actors who are autonomous or semiautonomous from Mexican cartel control—has increasingly fragmented Mexico’s fentanyl trade. Independent fentanyl producers are attracted to the drug’s profitability and the low barriers to market entry, including the ease of synthesizing it using basic lab equipment and few personnel.

Colombia-based TCOs and illegal armed groups are responsible for producing and exporting the vast majority of cocaine that reaches the United States, some of which is transshipped through Ecuador, contributing to an uptick in violent criminal conflicts that spurs regional migration.

Mexico-based TCOs are ramping up lethal attacks in Mexico against rivals and Mexican security forces using IEDs, including landmines, mortars, and grenades. In 2024, there were nearly 1,600 attacks on Mexican security forces using IEDs, surging from only three reported attacks between 2020- 2021. The sophistication of TCO tactics is reshaping Mexico’s security landscape and has heightened the risk to security forces.

Tren de Aragua is not mentioned in the report; Venezuela is mentioned once (because, with Mexicans and Guatemalans, they are the migrants most commonly trying to enter the country through the Mexican border). El Salvador and MS-13 are likewise not mentioned.

But since then, the IC has done a National Intelligence Estimate that formalizes what became clear in the Threats Hearings. Of the 18 intelligence agencies who contributed to the assessment, only the FBI even claimed that the Venezuelan government was involved with TdA.

The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements, according to people familiar with the matter.

[snip]

The intelligence product found that although there are some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader. The product builds on U.S. intelligence findings in February, first reported by the New York Times, that the gang is not controlled by Venezuela.

An unnamed person in Tulsi’s office accused the entire IC of a Deep State plot, pitting the DNI aggressively against her subordinates.

When asked about the findings, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence dismissed it as the work of “deep state actors” working in conjunction with the media.

“President Trump took necessary and historic action to safeguard our nation when he deported these violent Tren de Aragua terrorists,” the statement said. “Now that America is safer without these terrorists in our cities, deep state actors have resorted to using their propaganda arm to attack the President’s successful policies.”

All of it — all of Trump’s March campaign to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to start deporting people without due process — all of it is based on wildly unfounded propaganda, propaganda about who Bukele is, propaganda about what TdA is, propaganda about who these makeup artists and soccer players are.

There is a great deal of angst among centrist Democratic consultants and pundits that Trump will always have the upper hand on immigration. And while it’s true that that’s what has prevented Trump’s polling from cratering, it is already the case that Americans don’t like specific aspects of Trump’s immigration policy.

The vast majority — 82% — of Americans believe Trump should obey court orders even if he disagrees with them, and 56% think he should stop “deporting people” (again, very vague) specifically:

But the details of the policy Trump is carrying out are even more removed from the polling — even more unpopular, reflecting deep reservations among the public about what the president is doing.

For example, when various pollsters asked if they would support deporting immigrants who have been here more than 10 years (as in the case of Abrego Garcia), U.S. adults said “no” by a 37 percentage point margin; Americans disapprove of deporting immigrants who have broken no laws other than laws governing entry; they oppose deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign jails, such as CECOT, and they oppose housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay while they are processed. All of these are policies the Trump administration has now floated or is actively carrying out.

But here’s what else the polling never accounted for: even in real time, it was clear Trump’s strength on immigration was based on a massive campaign of propaganda (just as Trump had tried with less success in 2018 and 2020).

More than $247 million was spent in the first six months of this year on television, streaming platform and digital ads that mention immigration, according to AdImpact, which tracks campaign advertising. That is $40 million more than ads that mention any other issue.

Over 90 percent of the ads supported Republican candidates and were paid for by their campaigns or political action committees backing them.

The level of spending underscores how important Republicans view border security and immigration in this year’s elections. While polls show voters overall rank issues at the border as less important to them than the economy, inflation and protecting democracy, Republican voters consistently rank it as among the most important.

The Washington Post analyzed the transcripts, images and on-screen text featured in more than 700 campaign ads that mention immigration and that ran from January through June for the presidential and Senate races, as well as congressional primaries and major state campaigns.

Taken as a whole, the ads convey an unrealistic portrait of the border as being overrun and inaccurately characterize immigrants generally as a threat, of which there is little evidence. FBI data show U.S. border cities are among the nation’s safest. And a 2023 report from a group of economists found immigrants are at least 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born individuals.

Click through to that story, because it was extremely comprehensive, but also just a single story amid a campaign focused on other things.

Donald Trump won election by staging spectacular propaganda in places like Aurora, Colorado, where Stephen Miller tried to drown out the Republican Mayor’s debunking of his false claims. Donald Trump won election by falsely accusing a productive group of Haitian immigrants were eating house pets. Trump won election by claiming that a bunch of criminal aliens safely held in US prisons were, instead wandering the streets.

Donald Trump won, in significant part by stoking fear of immigrants, based off a flood of propaganda that Democrats only responded to with whack-a-mole efforts to combat individual lies.

Thus far, Democrats are still largely fighting a game of whack-a-mole, though one facilitated by human interest and the Fifth Amendment.

Thus far, the campaign to fight back against Trump’s authoritarian immigration crackdown has focused on individual stories: Abrego Garcia’s efforts to raise his three American citizen children, Rumeysa Öztürk’s research on how to make social media useful, Mohsen Mahdawi’s empathy for both Palestinians and Jews. These are individuals, and once they are viewed as individuals, most Americans don’t support their draconian treatment.

But it has yet to account for the fact that it is based on far bigger lies, bigger lies that Stephen Miller manufactured to justify claiming expansive powers in the name of fear.

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Why Did Donald Trump Free Someone He Purports To Be a Dangerous Terrorist?

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Donald Trump, Nayib Bukele, and Kristi Noem love to make fascist spectacle.

They did it with the video showing the arrival of hundreds of people Trump sent to Bukele’s concentration camp. Noem did it with her visit to the camp. And they did it with the planned theater yesterday, including the staged hot mic moment where Trump told Bukele he wanted to send “homegrowns” to the concentration camp at CECOT.

They do it because fascist spectacle inspires fear. They do it because fascist spectacle goes viral, including with the help of data mules who purport to oppose its content.

They do it because it short circuits rational thought, overwhelming such rational thought with emotion.

The effect of yesterday’s fascist spectacle led virtually everyone to focus on a detail that won’t help the immediate fight before us — Trump’s interest in deporting “homegrowns,” an interest he has stated openly over and over, starting during campaign — rather than on details that might help Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and in the process help to prevent similar treatment of other migrants and, ultimately, American citizens.

Few people raised any of the questions posed by Trump’s latest attempt to retcon a legal case he already blew. Let’s start with the big one:

Why did Trump free someone, Abrego Garcia, whom Stephen Miller insists is a dangerous terrorist?

The latest theory about Abrego Garcia — one DOJ first rolled out at the Fourth Circuit — is that when the Trump Administration designated MS-13 a foreign terrorist organization earlier this year, it meant Abrego Garcia was no longer eligible for the withholding of removal granted to him in 2019.

It is true that an immigration judge concluded six years ago that Abrego Garcia should not be returned to El Salvador, given his claims about threats from a different gang. Final Removal Order 7–10. That conclusion was dubious then (and increasingly so now). But it has become totally untenable, given the Secretary of State’s designation of MS-13 as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in February. 90 Fed. Reg. at 10030–31.

As a result of that designation, and Abrego Garcia’s membership in that terrorist organization, he would no longer be eligible for withholding relief under the federal immigration laws. 8 U.S.C. §§ 1231(b)(3)(B)(iv); 1227(a)(4)(B). And as even Plaintiffs admit, the Government had available a procedural mechanism under governing regulations to reopen the immigration judge’s prior order, and terminate its withholding protection. See Reply 8. To be sure, the Government did not avail itself of that procedure in this case. But through the lens of the public interest, the district court’s stunning injunction does not fit that error. A mistake of process does not warrant the unprecedented remedy ordered—one that demands the return of a foreign terrorist from the foreign sovereign that agreed to take him.

Before this claim, DOJ barely mentioned two earlier rulings from 2019 (one two) asserting Abrego Garcia could not be released because of hearsay ties to MS-13, relying instead on procedural arguments. In a footnote, Judge Xinis ruled that DOJ did not rely on it before her.

Defendants did not assert—at any point prior to or during the April 4, 2025, hearing—that Abrego Garcia was an “enemy combatant,” an “alien enemy” under the Alien Enemies Act, 50 U.S.C. § 21, or removable based on MS13’s recent designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under 8 U.S.C. § 1189. Invoking such theories for the first time on appeal cannot cure the failure to present them before this Court. In any event, Defendants have offered no evidence linking Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or to any terrorist activity. And vague allegations of gang association alone do not supersede the express protections afforded under the INA, including 8 U.S.C. §§ 1231(b)(3)(A), 1229a, and 1229b.

As Judge Stephanie Thacker noted in the Fourth Circuit opinion denying a stay the government thereby could not raise it before her.

Finally, I turn to the Government’s assertion that the public interest favors a stay because Abrego Garicia is a “prominent” member of MS-13 and is therefore “no longer eligible for withholding relief.” Mot. for Stay at 14–15. Whatever the merits of the 2019 determination of the Immigration Judge (“IJ”) regarding Abrego Garcia’s connection to MS-13,8 the Government presented “[n]o evidence” to the district court to “connect[] Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or any other criminal organization.” Dis.t Ct. Op. at 22 n.19; see also id. at 2 n.2 (“Invoking such theories for the first time on appeal cannot cure the failure to present them before this Court.”). Indeed, such a fact cannot be gleaned from this record, which shows that Abrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life. Tellingly, the Government “abandon[ed]” its position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community” at the hearing before the district court. Dist. Ct. Op. at 22 n.19. The balance of equities must tip in the movant’s favor based on the record before the issuing court. An unsupported — and then abandoned — assertion that Abrego Garcia was a member of a gang, does not tip the scales in favor of removal in violation of this Administration’s own9 withholding order. If the Government wanted to prove to the district court that Abrego Garcia was a “prominent” member of MS-13, it has had ample opportunity to do so but has not — nor has it even bothered to try.

The Government’s argument that there is a public interest in removing members of “violent transnational gangs” from this country is no doubt true, but it does nothing to help the Government’s cause here. As noted, the Government has made no effort to demonstrate that Abrego Garcia is, in fact, a member of any gang, nor did the Government avail itself of the “procedural mechanism under governing regulations to reopen the immigration judge’s prior order[] and terminate its withholding protection.” Mot. for Stay at 16–17. The Government may not rely on its own failure to circumvent its own ruling that Abrego Garcia could not be removed to El Salvador.

8 Even then, the Government’s “evidence” of any connection between Abrego Garcia and MS-13 was thin, to say the least. The Government’s claim was based on (1) Abrego Garcia “wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” and (2) “a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived.” S.A. 146 n.5; Mot. for Stay Add. at 10–11.

9 Of note, the IJ’s 2019 decision, which granted Abrego Garcia withholding of removal to El Salvador pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3)(A) because he faced threats to his life from an El Salvadoran gang that had targeted him and his family, was during President Trump’s 2016–2020 term in office. That decision became final on November 9, 2019, and was not appealed by this Administration.

But let’s take this retcon on its face. Stephen Miller has now decided, with no evidence provided, that Abrego Garcia is a “prominent” leader of MS-13, a gang on which DOJ focused closely for the entirety of the first Trump Administration. Miller says that Abrego Garcia is a danger to the community. Miller keeps screeching about terrorism.

If what Miller is saying now is true, it means that Trump released a dangerous criminal back in 2019. Why did Trump leave this man on the street to do dangerous things like raising three American citizen children for six years?

Update: Roger Parloff has a good summary of the flimsy case that Abrego Garcia has ties to MS-13.

Why is Trump so weak that he can’t make requests of the dictator of a small country?

Next consider Pam Bondi’s claim that, notwithstanding public reports that the detainees are just being held in CECOT for a year, notwithstanding Kristi Noem’s visit to the concentration camp, notwithstanding that the government just sent another ten people down there, the government is helpless to get Abrego Garcia back.

What does this say about Trump’s weakness as a President?

What kind of weak ass man can’t even make a request of a small Central American nation?

How does Trump think he’ll negotiate with Xi Jinping if he can’t even make a simple request of Bukele?

Will Stephen Miller send adjudged terrorists like Stewart Rhodes and Joe Biggs to Bukele’s concentration camp? Will Miller send DC US Attorney Ed Martin there, for palling around with adjudged terrorist Kelly Meggs, the same kind of associational ties used to send at least one of the men on the flights on March 15 to CECOT?

Next, let’s take Trump at his word that he wants to send “homegrowns” to CECOT.

Should Stewart Rhodes and Joe Biggs — both adjudged to be terrorists, both radicalized in the United States — both be packing their bags for the concentration camp? If Ed Martin has been palling around with adjudged terrorist Kelly Meggs — the same kind of associational guilt used to send at least one of the Venezuelans in the March 15 flight — should he worry about packing his bags?

Will Stephen Miller send his terrorists to the concentration camp?

Is Miller using the designation of terrorism just as a way to criminalize brown people, or will he send terrorists from his own tribe to the concentration camp?

Why is Stephen Miller terrified of — why does he want you to be terrified of — loving fathers? 

Miller has been accusing journalists who describe the contributions Abrego Garcia has made as a loving father to three American citizen children of lying, because journalists refuse to repeat his bleated accusations of terrorism with no evidence. Miller and Pam Bondi are working hard to get people to dumbly adopt their accusations.

But why is Miller so afraid of journalists describing Abrego Garcia as what he is, a father from Maryland?

Why does Pam Bondi keep destroying the careers of DOJ attorneys because they tell the truth?

When DOJ decided to retcon this case, they scapegoated the lawyer from whom they had withheld any sound legal basis, Erez Reuvani, along with his supervisor, both of whom were put on leave.

This, in spite of the fact that Drew Ensign called Reuveni “top notched” when he promoted him just weeks earlier.

In a March 21 email announcing Mr. Reuveni’s promotion to acting deputy director of the department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, his boss, Drew C. Ensign, lauded him for working on cases filed against sanctuary cities accused of defying federal immigration laws, and for generally helping to expand the department’s litigation activities.

“I want to thank those who submitted interest for the acting positions — we had outstanding choices, which helps go to show the excellent caliber of our team,” Mr. Ensign wrote.

Mr. Ensign has been handling a separate immigration case, one in which he has been defending the Trump administration’s use of a rarely invoked wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to summarily deport scores of Venezuelan migrants accused of belonging to the street gang Tren de Aragua.

As DOJ has provided increasingly contemptuous updates to Judge Xinis, the AUSA who had appeared before her, Tarra DeShields, has backed off vouching for the arguments DOJ has made, instead listing her involvement as “fil[ing]” updates.

Finally, Ensign filed a notice of appearance and, apparently, took on this dogshit argument himself, as he did the Alien Enemies Act before Judge Boasberg.

Obviously, even committed immigration lawyers are unwilling to make these arguments. How many career attorneys will Pam Bondi chase away while floating these arguments?? How many careers will she destroy because the actions of the Trump administration have no defense in the law?

Has Bondi’s DOJ lost all presumption of regularity?

And the whole process of admitting fault, suspending the person who (along with several others) told that truth, and then inventing new theories after the fact has to start destroying the entire concept of presumption of regularity for DOJ.

Even before DeShields started getting cold feet, even before Stephen Miller started disclaiming the error that everyone has admitted, Ben Wittes raised this question: At what point are judges entitled to demand proof from DOJ lawyers for their claims?

Will Xinis demand that DOJ document their new theory that Trump’s terrorist designations retroactively make judge’s orders disappear?

Would Marco Rubio deport his own grandfather to a concentration camp if Stephen Miller told him to?

Abrego Garcia’s story — of a man who came to the US to seek a better life without proper paperwork, but who was allowed to stay and build a life — is not all that different from the story of Marco Rubio’s own grandfather, who was almost denied entry in part because of suspicions he had communist sympathies and even then only allowed to stay as a parolee.

It had been almost three years since he had last set foot in the United States, and he no longer had the proper credentials to enter. They told him he could stay for the time being, but if he wanted to avoid deportation, he would have to plead his case.

“I always thought of being here in the United States as a resident, living permanently here,” the slight 62-year-old grandfather, speaking through an interpreter, said at a hearing five weeks later. He said that he had previously returned to Cuba because he did not want to be a burden on his family in the United States, but that the Cuban government had grown too oppressive and he feared what might happen if he stayed.

The immigration officer was unmoved. He did not see an exiled family man — just someone who had no visa, worked for the Castro government and could pose a security risk.

“It is ordered that the applicant be excluded and deported from the United States,” he said matter-of-factly, according to an audio recording of the proceedings stored by the National Archives. He stopped to ask if Mr. Garcia understood.

“Yes, I do,” Mr. Garcia said plaintively.

That easily could have been the end of his American story. But someone in the immigration office on Biscayne Boulevard that day — the paperwork does not make clear exactly who or why — had a change of heart. Mr. Garcia was granted status as a parolee, a gray area of the law that meant he would not get a green card but could remain in the United States.

[snip]

Despite Mr. Garcia’s insistence that he was fleeing oppression, immigration officials raised suspicions that he might harbor communist sympathies, the records reveal. That charge, had they pursued it, could have led to a conclusion that he was a national security threat. (Details of Mr. Garcia’s immigration odyssey were reported in 2012 by Manuel Roig-Franzia in his book “The Rise of Marco Rubio.”)

In an interview, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that some would see a conflict between the stricter immigration and refugee policies he supports and his grandfather’s experience. Immigration records also show that other members of Mr. Rubio’s family — two aunts and an uncle — were admitted as refugees.

But Mr. Rubio said the difference between then and now is how much more sophisticated foreign infiltrators like the Islamic State have become, and how dangerous they are.

“I recognize that’s a valid point,” the senator said, “But what you didn’t have was a widespread effort on behalf of Fidel Castro to infiltrate into the United States killers who were going to detonate weapons and kill people.”

Last month, Trump announced the cessation of various parole programs, including a recent one including Cubans, effective on April 24. Which means, within days, Cubans could be among the Hispanic migrants that Stephen Miller packages up to send to Bukele’s concentration camp.

How many Cubans will Marco Rubio send away to a concentration camp? How many lives like Rubio’s own will the Secretary of State doom with his enthusiasm to send send loving fathers to concentration camps?

For too long Trump’s lefty opponents (liberals and progressives and those further left; anti-Trump Republicans are, in my opinion, actually far better at this) have largely failed to make Trump’s fascism a political problem. And while lawyers have done a great job of humanizing their clients — including Abrego Garcia — in public opinion, the rest of it, the contradictions and confessions of pathetic weakness, has largely gone unmentioned.

Do not abdicate making Abrego Garcia a political, as well as a legal, case. Do not get distracted by the fascist spectacle from using the fragile story rolled out yesterday against Trump. The stakes in this moment are too high.

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Stephen Miller’s Presumed Babysitting of JD Vance’s European Animosity … and DOD’s Potential War Crimes

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Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony at the threat hearings was clear: After falsely claiming that fentanyl was the top threat to the United States, she said the second threat was China. That’s important background to the most interesting comment I’ve seen about the chat.

The Trumpsters on the chat were obsessed with making Europe pay for the operation. But — as  Nathalie Tocci noted in this NYT story focused on the Trumpsters’ obsession — the entire conversation ignored the import to China of transit through the Suez Canal.

“It is clear that the trans-Atlantic relationship, as was, is over, and there is, at best, an indifferent disdain,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, who formerly advised a top E.U. official. “And at worst, and closer to that, there is an active attempt to undermine Europe.”

[snip]

He and others, like Anna Sauerbrey, the foreign editor of Die Zeit, noted that the explicit demand for payment, rather than just political and military support, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, was new. And it ignored the fact that “the U.S. depends on global trade,” she said, and that “France, Britain and the Netherlands have deployed ships to the region” for the same purpose. The Americans, she said, “are constantly overlooking European efforts.”

China, for example, gets most of its oil imports through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and does much of its export trade with Europe through the same sea route. But no one is asking China to pay, Ms. Tocci noted.

In the texts released by Atlantic, there’s actually even more focus on the trade that transits the canal than the original story.

Indeed, it was at the center of debates over whether the strikes should go forward, which decision Tulsi Gabbard claimed had been made long before the chat started, and which debate, in yesterday’s cover story, was hailed as a policy process working.

Eleven minutes after Mike Waltz kicks off the thread with instructions that Joint Staff is sending “a more specific sequence of events in the coming days,” JD Vance piped in to say he thought the strikes were a mistake.

He focused on the fact that (he claimed) just 3% of US trade goes through Bab el-Mandeb, whereas 40% of Europe’s does.

Both Joe Kent (Tulsi’s unconfirmed aide) and John Ratcliffe respond that they could wait; indeed, in an arguably classified text, Ratcliffe says that more time would “be used to identify better starting points for coverage on Houthi leadership.” Kent also offers to provide unclassified details on shipping, perhaps to correct JD’s claim.

Remember, the person most likely to have been the “JG” whom Waltz tried to add to the chat instead of Jeff Goldberg is Jamieson Greer, Trump’s trade representative, who likely would have had the precise details (and also might be sufficiently grown up to point out how stupid this Signal chat was).

Then Pete Hegseth pipes up to second JD’s specific concerns about messaging, including his worry that (ha!) the plans will leak and “we look indecisive.”

Waltz responds to JD’s original point, correcting him about how much US traffic transits Bab el-Mandeb, accounting for the fact that the stuff transiting the canal ends up in trade with the US.

That’s the first 27 minutes of the substantive discussion. Somewhere between 8:32 and 8:42AM, Waltz adds “SM,” believed to be Stephen Miller.

After adding Miller (but without mentioning he added him), Waltz returns to the issue of sea lanes, asserting that unless the US reopens them, they won’t get reopened.

JD suggests that if Hegseth is okay with the strikes, “let’s go.” He suggests Houthi targeting of Saudi oil facilities are one downside risk, not Saudi involvement, which is why the US has often chosen to lead on Houthi strikes.

Then Hegseth agrees that the Europeans are “free-loading It’s PATHETIC,” and says “we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can” reopen the shipping lanes — which may suggest he believes China could do it too.

As Tocci pointed out to NYT, there’s no discussion of asking China to pay for these strikes. No discussion of how doing so for China helps China build its influence in Europe. No discussion at all in how this might affect China.

These boys purportedly intent on confronting China simply don’t consider the policy decision’s affect on China. JD and Whiskey Pete, at least, are interested primarily in hurting Europe.

Another 46 minutes elapse before SM — added after JD was wailing about the Europeans — comments. He offers an interpretation of what Trump said: a green light on the operation, he opines, but the US would harass Egypt and Europe after the fact to extort a payback.

Eleven minutes later, Hegseth — the guy to whom JD appealed on this issue — agreed with SM’s interpretation of the President’s intent.

That settled it. As I noted, SM’s — presumed to be Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy advisor — interpretation of the President’s intent is the sole backup in this now public document that the President authorized the strike at all: “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light.”

And the next thing we know, after Waltz resets how long until this PRA/FRA-covered communications will be destroyed illegally — DOD is flattening the apartment of someone’s girlfriend.

Fist-flag-fire!

By March 17, locals in Sanaa were claiming 53 people had been killed in this and ensuing strikes, including five children.

Even ignoring the foreknowledge of a civilian target, that makes the whole thing legally precarious, because everyone on the list is relying on SM’s interpretation of presidential intent. With the foreknowledge, it puts everyone involved in the strike at much greater legal risk because the legality of it, seemingly a target with significant civilian exposure, is so fragile.

But the other thing it does is show SM — again, believed to be Trump’s top domestic policy advisor — serving as the surrogate for Trump, and doing so in a way designed to shut JD up.

Like wormtongue, his mere gloss of the leader’s intent is treated with uncontested authority.

 

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Seven Reasons Trump’s Entire National Security Team Should Resign in Disgrace

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The White House, with the help of Politico, is trying to make National Security Adviser Mike Waltz the fall guy for adding Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg to the Signal thread on which they planned war strikes against Yemen.

Nothing is decided yet, and White House officials cautioned that President Donald Trump would ultimately make the decision over the next day or two as he watches coverage of the embarrassing episode.

A senior administration official told POLITICO on Monday afternoon that they are involved in multiple text threads with other administration staffers on what to do with Waltz, following the bombshell report that the top aide inadvertently included Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a private chat discussing a military strike on Houthis.

“Half of them saying he’s never going to survive or shouldn’t survive,” said the official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberation. And two high-level White House aides have floated the idea that Waltz should resign in order to prevent the president from being put in a “bad position.”

“It was reckless not to check who was on the thread. It was reckless to be having that conversation on Signal. You can’t have recklessness as the national security adviser,” the official said.

Mind you, the knives have been out for Waltz already, and the notion that he was in touch with a Neocon journalist like Goldberg would only help those already trying to oust Waltz make the case that he’s not on Trump’s America First agenda.

And Politico doesn’t mention whether its sources were also on the Signal thread, and whether their discussions about making Waltz take the fall were done on Signal.

It is a transparent attempt to make a major breach — potentially a crime — into something else, the forgivable error of adding the wrong person to a chat thread.

This cover story, that this is just a reckless mistake about adding the wrong person to a Signal thread, also happens to be the line Trump’s closest allies in the Senate and the few Fox News hosts Trump hasn’t already hired into his Administration are parroting on TV.

1. Waltz set up a Signal chat to make war plans without verifying the ID of those included

To be sure, it was pretty boneheaded that Waltz didn’t better verify the people he was first adding to Signal and then putting on a “principles [sic] group” to plan war strikes.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me.

[snip]

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

Note, at about the time Waltz made this list, 11:28 PM Moscow time, list member Steve Witkoff was meeting with Putin, after having been left waiting for hours.

So yeah, Trump’s National Security Adviser exercised little diligence about how he set up a list to carry on highly classified conversations involving people’s cell phones, including cell phones that might be in Russia.

2. The entire national security team participated in a potential violation of the Espionage Act

But the effort to claim this is just a mistake in the creation of the Signal list is an attempt to downplay that Trump’s CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, sent the identity of a currently serving intelligence officer and later sent what appears to be sources and methods on Signal, and then his Secretary of Defense, Whiskey Pete Hegseth, sent operational details of the imminent strikes on Yemen on Signal, and then Waltz himself sent out what sound like the immediate results of the operation, also on Signal.

All those men, who loudly condemned Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden for their unintentional mishandling of classified information, who demanded that DOJ prosecute such lapses, sent information on an insecure chat that happened to include a journalist.

18 USC 793(f) makes it a crime to so negligently mishandle National Defense Information that someone not authorized to receive it does receive it.

(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

And yet Trump’s entire national security team — not only his National Security Adviser and his CIA Director and his Secretary of Defense, but also his Chief of Staff, his Secretary of State, his Vice President, his Director of National Intelligence, and others — did nothing as the entire team shared information about an upcoming and recently completed military attack, on Signal.

The entire gang was in on it.

3. [Trump claims] his entire national security team may have committed a crime and also an embarrassing story was about to break but no one told him

When Trump was first asked about the story, he played dumb, claiming he didn’t know anything about it.

I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. But I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?

Sure, this is almost certainly a lie. Goldberg says he told the White House about it at 9AM yesterday morning.

But now that Trump has told the lie, he has also claimed that after his entire national security team learned that a journalist may have witnessed them engage in behavior that might violate the Espionage Act, none of them told him — not JD Vance, not Mike Waltz, not Susie Wiles, not the NSC spox who gave on the record confirmation that the thread was authentic — none of them alerted Trump to the breach. Trump would further have you believe that none of them told him — not JD Vance, not Mike Waltz, not Susie Wiles, not the NSC spox who gave on the record confirmation that the thread was authentic — that an incredibly damaging story was about to drop.

If that were true it would mean Trump could trust no one to keep him informed of the most basic things. It would mean his entire national security team fucked up and kept it a secret from him.

4. DOD attacked a foreign country based on Stephen Miller’s feels of Trump’s intent

One weird line in the Atlantic story describes how Stephen Miller (Trump’s domestic policy advisor, not formally on his foreign policy team) interpreted Trump’s views from a prior meeting in the Situation Room, and Miller’s interpretation was all it took to affirm Trump’s intent to launch strikes on Yemen.

At this point, the previously silent “S M” joined the conversation. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

That message from “S M”—presumably President Trump’s confidant Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, or someone playing Stephen Miller—effectively shut down the conversation. The last text of the day came from “Pete Hegseth,” who wrote at 9:46 a.m., “Agree.”

This entire operation was — is, still — being authorized solely on Presidential authority.

But the Presidential authority, the thing that gives it some cover of law, amounts to Stephen Miller’s feels about the President’s intent.

That’s a pretty flimsy basis on which to launch military strikes.

5. Hegseth lied when caught

All this broke as Pete Hegseth was flying to Hawaii, his first trip to Asia as Defense Secretary (if he makes it that far).

When asked about sending war plans on a thread that included a journalist, Hegseth lied, claiming no one had been texting war plans. (In a truly spectacular touch, Hegseth put the video of himself lying up on his “DOD Rapid Response” Xitter account, after which it promptly got fact-checked.

I get that these underqualified right wing white men never take personal accountability for their actions.

But this undermines whatever leadership credibility Hegseth otherwise might have had.

The military requires accountability from its leaders.

Hegseth refused to take any.

6. Waltz set the threads to autodelete, likely deliberately defying the Presidential Records Act

According to Goldberg, Mike Waltz set the text threads to auto-delete.

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

Not only would deleting this thread without creating a record violate the Presidential and Federal Records Acts, but that’s probably why they were sending war plans on Signal.

That is, the most likely reason why Trump’s entire national security team was using an insecure platform to plan war strikes was to ensure there were no embarrassing records for posterity, a violation of the law.

7. The entire national security team may have committed a crime in plain sight but Pam Bondi and Kash Patel won’t investigate

Pam Bondi was admittedly busy yesterday making multiple TV appearances in which she scolded Jasmine Crockett for opposing Elon Musk’s efforts to dismantle the government.

In none of them did she say she was opening an investigation into whether Mike Waltz or any of the other people on the list violated the Espionage Act or any other laws.

Who are we kidding? There’s no way Bondi or Kash Patel will investigate this (though they too criticized Biden and Hillary about classified information).

And that, in and of itself, is reason why Bondi and Patel should resign in disgrace. Because even in the face of a humiliating security breach, they’ll do nothing to hold Trump’s people accountable.

Update: I watched the Threats hearing at which Tulsi and John Ratcliffe testified. Both seem to be claiming that nothing they posted was classified, but they defer to DOD regarding whether anything Whiskey Pete shared was classified. Clearly Whiskey Pete has retroactively declassified material to cover up his possible crime.

Of note, Ratcliffe did not know (and seemed surprised) that Steve Witkoff was in Russia during the period of the list. And Tulsi admitted she had been overseas during the period as well; she did a trip to the Pacific, including stops in Hawaii, Japan, Thailand, India and France.

Finally, Tulsi freely agreed to have her own use of Signal (and other encrypted apps) audited to make sure she’s not doing anything impermissible; Ratcliffe was cagier, and said only he’d do so if NSC agreed.

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Stephen Miller Makes a Case to Defund or Deport Elon Musk

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Over the weekend, ICE arrested one of the people involved in Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protests, Mahmoud Khalil. It appears that they first stopped him with the intent of arresting him on a claim his student visa had been canceled; but even after they confirmed he was a Green Card holder, they detained him anyway.

On Saturday, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers detained Mahmoud Khalil – a recent Columbia University graduate who helped lead the Gaza solidarity encampment – at his New York City home, an apartment building owned by the school, says advocates.

According to the advocates, at around 8:30 PM, Khalil and his wife – who is eight months pregnant – had just unlocked the door to their building when two plainclothes DHS agents pushed inside behind them. The agents allegedly did not identify themselves at first, instead asking for Khalil’s identity before detaining him.

The agents proceeded to tell Khalil’s wife that if she did not leave her husband and go to their apartment, they would arrest her too. The agents claimed that the State Department had revoked Khalil’s student visa, with one agent presenting what he claimed was a warrant on his cell phone. But Khalil, according to advocates, has a green card. Khalil’s wife went to their apartment to get the green card.

“He has a green card,” an agent apparently said on the phone, confused by the matter. But then after a moment, the agent claimed that the State Department had “revoked that too.”

Meanwhile, Khalil had been on the phone with his attorney, Amy Greer who was trying to intervene, asking why he was being detained, if they had a warrant, and explaining that Khalil was a green card holder. The attorney had circled back to demanding to see a warrant when the agents apparently instead hung up the phone.

Khalil was initially detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in downtown New York, pending an appearance before an immigration judge. Greer said they now do not know his precise whereabouts. They were initially told he was sent to an ICE facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. But when his wife tried to visit him, she was told he wasn’t there. They have received reports that he may be transferred as far away as Louisiana.

This feels like another bone-headed move — like the firing of FEMA workers who were dutifully helping try to claw back funds already granted to NYC and the attempted investigation of an EPA worker who didn’t do what a Project Veritas video suggested — which the Administration will engage in further corruption to try to defend, making it and the authoritarianism far worse.

People will be fired.

Explanations will be ret-coned.

And either they’ll have to let Khalil free or — more likely — the Trump Administration will attempt to find cause, possibly criminal charges, to attempt to hold him longer (he has, indeed, been located in Jena, Louisiana). Trump will rely heavily on War on Terror precedents that allow the Executive to scream “terror” and with that detain even Green Card holders.

As we wait for better answers about what happened to Khalil, right wingers have taken to Xitter to wave their dicks around.

Newly elected right wing Congressman Brandon Gill, for example, suggested that “maybe we shouldn’t tolerate foreigners seizing control of US academic buildings (while including a screen cap that said Khalil was not in the group that occupied the building).

Gill is calling for the government to take action against foreigners seizing academic buildings even as South African immigrant Elon Musk takes over Department of Education, doing far more damage than protestors did.

And Stephen Miller insisted that the US would send any foreigners sympathizing with terrorism home.

Of course, one of Miller’s chief allies, Elon Musk, routinely platforms people sympathizing with far right terrorism — indeed, he played a direct role in ginning up riots in the UK and elsewhere.

The basis of this crackdown are two executive orders, admittedly focused on schools rather than government contractors, using Title VI funding as a means to dictate what otherwise First Amendment protected entities enjoy. (Note that Khalil’s arrest is inconsistent with Trump’s decision to strip $400 million in funds from Columbia, which would suggest the university, not Khalil did something wrong.)

But it nevertheless remains true that, to the extent that Xitter is protected speech (it is! just like university campuses!), Trump’s EO envisions intervening when government contractors don’t do enough to combat antisemitism.

And compared to Columbia, Elon Musk has been downright solicitous of antisemitism.

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Five Ways Trump Is Sabotaging the United States

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Yesterday, arguably for (at least) the second time, Trump declared fealty to Vladimir Putin.

As I contemplated the awful but in no way surprising developments (here’s a good podcast, featuring Marc Polymeropoulos, Doug Lute, and Rosa Brooks), I thought about the various ways Trump is sabotaging the United States, based on apparently different motivations.

But we only assume those motivations are different because we (or much of the legacy press, anyway) accept the claimed motivation Trump offers. When you look at all of them together, you simply can’t rule out they’re all part of the same effort to capitulate to Putin.

Project 2025

There’s a consensus that Trump is following the plan mapped out in Project 2025. This Politico report, from early February, laid out how Executive Orders Trump had signed implemented plans to attack diversity and LGBTQ protections, attack migrants, and protect disinformation. It focuses on fossil fuel plans that have mostly defunded renewable energy without raising fossil fuel exploitation (in part because it was already so high under Biden).

Even if that were the only thing going on or if that were really what was going on, it would raise real questions about foreign influence. Last year, Casey Michel mapped out how Viktor Orbán used the Heritage Foundation as a beachhead for his influence peddling in the US (which I discussed in this post on Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025).

While much attention has understandably focused on Heritage’s so-called “Project 2025,” which provides a roadmap for Trump to seize as much power as he can, such a shift has extended to foreign policy. This has been seen most especially in Heritage leading the effort to gut funding for Ukraine. But it’s also evident in the way Heritage has endeavored to anchor its relations with Orbán, making Budapest once more America’s preferred partner in Europe—regardless of the cost.

Much of that shift is downstream from Heritage’s leadership, overseen by Kevin Roberts. Appointed as Heritage’s president in 2021, Roberts immediately began remaking Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent—and began opening up Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S.

Part of that involved things like last week’s confab, one of many meetings between Roberts and Orbán. (After one 2022 sit-down, Roberts—who, among other things, has said he doesn’t think Joe Biden won the 2020 election—posted that it was an “honor” to meet with Orbán, praising his “movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families.”) But the relationship is structural as well: Heritage finalized what they refer to as a ‘landmark’ cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank that appears to exist only to praise Orbán’s government.*

The Budapest-based Danube Institute is largely unknown in the U.S., but it has transformed in recent years into one of the premier mouthpieces for propagating Orbánist policies. While it is technically independent, it is, as Jacob Heilbrunn notes in his new book on the American right’s infatuation with dictators, located “next to the prime minister’s building and funded by Orbán’s Fidesz party.” Indeed, the Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation directly bankrolled by the Hungarian state—meaning that the Danube Institute is, for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.

A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation told The New Republic that their arrangements with the Danube Institute is “restricted to carrying out educational research and analysis, as well as related events—none of which involved any financial commitment from either party” and that “at no point did Heritage receive funds from or pass funds to the Danube Institute, the Hungarian government, or the prime minister’s office.”

The Danube Institute claims it is dedicated to “advocat[ing] conservative and national values and thinking,” which almost always ends up with the institute praising Orbán’s pronouncements. It has become, according to Hungarian journalists at Atlatszo, “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s ideological expansion abroad”—and one of the “main vehicles” to “building a political network in the United States.

Christopher Rufo, the propagandist behind the demonization of trans people, has ties to the Danube Institute.

So even if this was just about implementing Project 2025, that would best be described as replacing American democracy with Orbanist authoritarianism — adopting the model from a key Putin puppet.

DOGE infiltration and destruction of US government

There have been a slew of stories about how DOGE provided cover for Russ Vought and Stephen Miller to implement Project 2025. Wired, for example, described how Stephen and his wife Katie, who is formally on the DOGE team, serve as gatekeepers to Elon and use Elon to carry out their dirty work.

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller has, along with Project 2025 coauthor and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, became one of Musk’s closest allies in the administration, The New York Times reported earlier this month. WIRED has learned that the relationship is far closer, and more complicated, than has been previously known publicly.

In many ways, Musk’s targeting of federal agencies is perfectly in sync with the aims of Miller, who has championed DOGE’s work internally and even helped in making a lot of it possible. (In public, Miller has equated federal workers with “radical left Communists” and “criminal cartels.”) Still, sources tell WIRED that Trumpworld is more comfortable with Musk taking the heat for the recent federal cuts rather than the less famous—and, in their view, far less telegenic—Miller.

Yet through their actions so far, the Millers and Musk have developed a MAGA version of the Pet Shop Boys adage from the song “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)”: You’ve got the brawn / I’ve got the brains. Stephen Miller’s knowledge of the federal apparatus, Katie Miller’s contacts on Capitol Hill, and the couple’s good standing among Trump loyalists, coupled with Musk’s relentless ambition and effectively infinite resources, made the scale of the DOGE government takeover possible. Musk is not the independent actor he’s often portrayed as and taken to be, in other words, but is rather carrying out actions essentially in concert with the man to whom the president has delegated much of the day-to-day work of governance.

“Stephen is kind of the prime minister,” one of three Republicans close to Trump and familiar with the situation tells WIRED. Another Republican familiar with the dynamic also used the term “PM” to describe Miller, short for prime minister. The implication is that Miller is carrying out the daily work of governance while Trump serves as head of state, focusing on the fun parts of being president.

But DOGE is going beyond the scope of Project 2025, and in ways that directly harm the United States.

Take the Project 2025 recommendations on USAID, the first target of DOGE. DOGE adopted the general theme of the Project 2025 chapter — that USAID had been used to implement a lot of radical plans. But the virtual elimination of USAID implemented last week goes well beyond Project 2025’s recommended reversal to 2019’s budget of $39.3 billion.

Project 2025 hailed Trump’s use of USAID to push for religious protection for Christians which — as I showed —  got shut down early along with everything else.

It promoted international religious freedom as a pillar of the agency’s work and built up an unprecedented genocide-response infrastructure.

It specifically called for greater reliance on local NGOs — and pointed to PEPFAR as a model.

Streamlining Procurement and Localizing the Partner Base. USAID is a grantmaking and contracting agency that disburses billions of dollars of federal funding in developing countries through implementing partners, such as U.N. agencies, international NGOs, for-profit companies, and local nongovernmental entities. In rare instances, such as in Jordan and Ukraine, the agency provides direct budget support to finance the operations of host-country governments. USAID far more often counts on expensive and ine!ective large contracts and grants to carry out its programs. It justifies these practices based on speed and a lower administrative burden on its institutional capacity.

[snip]

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has shown that localization at scale is possible within a short time span. Over the four years of the Trump Administration, the multibillion-dollar program increased the amount of funding disbursed to local entities from about 25 percent to nearly 70 percent with positive overall results. This model should be replicated across all of USAID.

But as declarations in various lawsuits repeat over and over, these local partners are not getting paid, and it’s destroying the credibility of the US (and rule of law).

11. Currently my mission has more than $30 million in unpaid invoices for 2 months of implementing partners’ work, with half of those past Prompt Payment Act due date (30 days) and incurring interest every day. If one were to extrapolate the numbers across all of the missions and USAID/Washington, given that annual USAID appropriation is $40 billion, the total dollar amount of unpaid invoices would certainly surpass $1billion at the most conservative estimate.

[snip]

13. Arbitrary withholding of due payments to U.S. and non-U.S. based partners does grave damage to the reputation and reliability of the U.S. government both domestically and internationally. USAID is a USG Agency which signed the contracts and grants in line with the Code of Federal Regulations and other statutes; USG refusal to pay for the past performed work and non-compliance with the TRO can shatter Americans’ certainty in the rule of law.

Rather than empowering local partners and capabilities, the quick decimation has devastated them — and left Americans still located overseas exposed to backlash.

USAID is just the most substantiated example of the sheer waste DOGE is creating. We’re seeing similarly stupid decisions in the firings of critical personnel (some of whom get hired back), but also the elimination of long-term maintenance or safety programs that will cost far more when those protections are gone.

Project 2025 envisioned stripping civil service protections and politicizing the bureaucracy. But with DOGE cuts, it’s not clear the bureaucracy can be rebuilt, even assuming the Heritage hires knew what they were doing. Meanwhile, the method of those cuts is more likely to elicit a backlash from judges, potentially even from the Supreme Court justices whom right wingers were counting on to bless all this.

And all that’s before you contemplate the possibility that Elon’s DOGE boys are doing something else with the data they’re accessing, or — intentionally or not — setting up backdoors via which adversaries can do so themselves.

Assume you were a true believer in Project 2025 (and not far greater authoritarianism). DOGE puts all that at risk, because by breaking so much so early, it is eliciting backlash and collapse of the economy.

The installation of useful idiots

It’s not just Elon who is making a mess. So are the other unqualified useful idiots Trump has installed — people like Pete Hegseth (who has fired three senior women officers after assuring Joni Ernst he wouldn’t target women) and Tulsi Gabbard (who parroted the same Russian propaganda she partly disavowed to get confirmed yesterday) and RFK Jr (who reneged on his promise not to cut off vaccine programs) and Kash Patel (who reneged on his promise to appoint a career FBI Agent as his Deputy).

These people are doing precisely the affirmative damage to the US that Democrats warned they would do — most obviously in RFK’s initial dismissal of the measles outbreak spreading from Texas to other states. And they’re doing it after years of parroting Russian propaganda.

The personalization of DOJ

We expected DOJ to be politicized in a second Trump term. I was even cynical enough to imagine that he would pardon all the January 6ers. The denialism about both Russia and January 6 were baked right into Project 2025.

  • The Federal Bureau of Investigation, knowing that claims of collusion with Russia were false,5 collaborated with Democratic operatives to inject the story into the 2016 election through strategic media leaks, falsified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications, and lied to Congress.6
  • Personnel within the FBI engaged in a campaign to convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign—while the FBI had possession of the laptop the entire time and could have clarified the authenticity of the source.

[snip]

  • The FBI engaged in a domestic influence operation to pressure social media companies to report more “foreign influence” than the FBI was actually seeing and stop the dissemination of and censor true information directly related to the 2020 presidential election.11

But the personalization of DOJ, along with Pam Bondi’s orders to stop chasing foreign influence operations, does something more.

It effectively makes foreign bribery — as well as the kind of kickbacks we saw in advance of Trump’s inauguration — legal.

As I noted here, the SEC, for example, has paused its suit against Justin Sun. As Judd Legum describes, this follows the Chinese-linked businessman’s multi-million “investment” in Trump’s crypto currency.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest.

[snip]

Sun’s purchase put millions in Trump’s pocket. WLF was entitled to “$30 million of initial net protocol revenue” in a reserve “to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve was met, a company owned by Trump would receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.” Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve. As of December 1, this amounted to $18 million for Trump — 75% of the revenues of all other tokens sold at the time. Sun also joined WLF as an advisor. While the purchase benefited Trump, WLF tokens are essentially worthless for Sun, as they are non-transferable and locked indefinitely.

Nevertheless, Sun has since invested another $45 million in WLF, bringing his total investment to $75 million. This means Sun’s purchases have sent more than $50 million to Trump, Bloomberg reported. Sun has also continued to shower Trump with praise. On January 22, Sun posted on X, “if I have made any money in cryptocurrency, all credit goes to President Trump.”

Once you’ve installed lawyers who publicly represent they are Trump’s lawyers, once you’ve ensured that no one friendly to Trump will be prosecuted for bribery, then Ukraine was bound to lose any negotiation with Russia. Russia has been dangling bribes in front of Trump for years and now they’ll be free to deliver in plain sight.

And Trump has never placed his own self interest behind the interests of the United States.

The capitulation to Russia

Keep all that in mind as you consider Trump’s abject capitulation yesterday.

Keep in mind that even before yesterday’s ambush of Zelenskyy, Pete Hegseth ordered Cyber Command to stand down any targeting of Russia.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Hegseth gave the instruction to Cyber Command chief Gen. Timothy Haugh, who then informed the organization’s outgoing director of operations, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Ryan Heritage, of the new guidance, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

The order does not apply to the National Security Agency, which Haugh also leads, or its signals intelligence work targeting Russia, the sources said.

CISA, too, has taken its focus off of Russia, something that risk grave damage to private companies as well as the government.

Liesyl Franz, deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity at the state department, said in a speech last week before a United Nations working group on cybersecurity that the US was concerned by threats perpetrated by some states but only named China and Iran, with no mention of Russia in her remarks. Franz also did not mention the Russia-based LockBit ransomware group, which the US has previously said is the most prolific ransomware group in the world and has been called out in UN forums in the past. The treasury last year said LockBit operates on a ransomeware-as-service model, in which the group licenses its ransomware software to criminals in exchange for a portion of the paid ransoms.

In contrast to Franz’s statement, representatives for US allies in the European Union and the UK focused their remarks on the threat posed by Moscow, with the UK pointing out that Russia was using offensive and malicious cyber-attacks against Ukraine alongside its illegal invasion.

“It’s incomprehensible to give a speech about threats in cyberspace and not mention Russia and it’s delusional to think this will turn Russia and the FSB [the Russian security agency] into our friends,” said James Lewis, a veteran cyber expert formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “They hate the US and are still mad about losing the cold war. Pretending otherwise won’t change this.”

The US policy change has also been established behind closed doors.

A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia.

A person familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.

The person said work that was being done on something “Russia-related” was in effect “nixed”.

And, again, this happened before the ambush yesterday.

Eight years ago, as Mueller’s prosecutors started to focus on Roger Stone’s possible implication in a hacking conspiracy with Russia, Trump declared that he was going to partner with Putin; Russia and the US would jointly guard things like elections.

Now, Trump has chosen to unilaterally disarm.

Yesterday, Roger Sollenberger unpacked the Gitub of one of Elon’s boys, Jordan Wick.

 

In addition to his AI start-up, AccelerateX (which Wired wrote about), Wick has been fiddling with:

  • Tracking government employees by union status
  • Downloading Xitter DMs
  • Identifying open source data on submarine cables, ports, and mineral deposits

Sure, the utility of some of that — tracking union status — maps right onto the Project 2025 plans DOGE is purportedly implementing, even if that, plus the DM download, raise grave concerns about privacy.

But the submarine cables too?

Even as Donald Trump has made his fealty to Putin clear, even as his Director of National Intelligence parrots Russian disinformation (protected now by the FBI), Elon Musk has been vacuuming up all the data of all the government. And every claim that he’s been modernizing networks or searching for fraud have fallen apart.

At this point, we simply cannot rule out deliberate wholesale sabotage.

Update: Thought I’d repost what I wrote in December in response to Kimberly Strassel complaining about Trump’s useful idiot picks.

But I don’t doubt that the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s advisory team believes that Bobby and Tulsi do accomplish something. The question is whether some really smart politicos believe it’ll be a good thing to kill children and give dictators America’s secrets and let the richest men in the world destroy America’s banking system and the dollar exchange — whether they believe this will win lasting approval from America’s great disaffected masses. It might well! It certainly will expand the pool of disaffected Americans, and with it, increase the market for a strong man to respond to it all.

Or whether there’s some reason Trump is tempting Republican Senators to defy his plans to do great damage to the United States. Perhaps he intends to dare them to start defying him in bulk.

Or perhaps the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s entourage simply has an unknown reason they want to destroy America. Maybe Trump has other election debts — debts he’d get in more trouble for ignoring — that make him amenable to dropping policy bomb after policy bomb on America’s children.

But that’s sort of the point. You’ve got Kimberly Strassel up in arms because Trump is going to the mat for a conspiracist with a Democratic name who’ll get children killed. But it’s more likely to do with the policy bombs that RFK will help Trump drop than the specific conversations that led Bobby Jr to drop out of the race.

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Trump Stewing because of Lies Stephen Miller Fed Him During the Campaign

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Thus far, Trump’s biggest success on immigration in his second term has been to claim credit — twice! — for things that Sleepy Joe Biden did, in one case years ago.

He threatened sanctions on Colombia, only to agree to let Colombian President Gustavo Petro send planes to fetch deportees, sometimes in Colombian military planes, rather than receive them in US military planes.

He threatened sanctions on Mexico, only to boast after Claudia Sheinbaum committed to put 5,000 fewer Mexican troops on the border than are already there, the same 10,000 that Biden obtained years ago.

He threatened sanctions on Canada, only to boast that Justin Trudeau agreed to the same $1.3 billion in investments to counter fentanyl trafficking he put in place in December.

As for his efforts to round up and deport migrants in the US? Almost two weeks ago, I noted that the quotas ICE introduced to try to boost the deportation numbers fell wildly short of delivering the deportations Trump had promised his rubes, to say nothing of the way those quotas will lead to deportation of non-criminal migrants instead of the violent criminals Trump claims to be targeting. Almost two weeks ago, Trump’s flunkies confessed they would never be able to meet his promises for mass deportation.

The fate of a highly publicized raid in Aurora last week is a spectacular case in point.

On Thursday, shortly after the raid, the Fox News propagandist whose job it is to stoke fear about migration, Bill Melugin, first celebrated the “massive” raid, only later to reveal the raid had resulted in far fewer arrests than promised and just one arrest of a Tren de Aragua member. ICE immediately blamed its failure to detain more people on leaks.

That same day, Tom Homan announced he may have to halt the kind of embed ICE has been all too happy to give Melugin, because of leaks or operational security; he did not say that truthful reports to Fox viewers about his failures gets him in trouble with the boss. Tom Homan can’t afford to have Trump know that this massive raid found only a single Tren de Aragua member.

The raid focused on an apartment complex that had been the focus of a wildly propagandistic Trump campaign event headlined by Stephen Miller last year.

Both reporting sympathetic to migrants and that of mainstream outlets describes what actually happened, why the raid failed to lead to the number of arrests Trump promised: Heavily armed officers swarmed the building and knocked on every door, but after residents didn’t open up, they finally left. (Update: Elevating this really good account of the raid GinnyRED57 put in comments.)

Heavily armed federal agents raided apartment buildings across metro Denver early Wednesday in a search for Venezuelan gang members and other migrants under the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort targeting major cities.

At least two dozen officers carrying high-powered weapons stormed several complexes before sunrise. In some cases, they were backed by large, military-style vehicles.

The Department of Homeland Security said on social media that it was targeting 100 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua for arrest and detention. It did not say how many people were taken into custody.

The operation included officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; and the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives.

[snip]

At an apartment complex in Denver, a 31-year-old Venezuelan man said that shortly after 5 a.m., ICE agents and other federal officers began yelling and loudly banging on every door.

The man, who asked that his name be withheld because he was afraid of being deported, said residents discreetly peered out their windows as large trucks and unmarked vehicles entered the parking lot.

Several residents said eight people were arrested at the complex.

People “hid with fear,” “didn’t open their doors” and remained “quiet without saying anything,” he said after all the agents had left.

In other words, while ICE had a few specific targets, they had no warrants for the vast majority of residences. They just kept knocking and knocking and knocking. And because the residents knew their rights, they didn’t open up.

It’s probably no surprise that this story from NBC is coming out days after the flopped Aurora raid. Trump is angry that his deportation numbers are falling so far short of what he promised his supporters.

Agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are under increasing pressure to boost the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants, as President Donald Trump has expressed anger that the amount of people deported in the first weeks of his administration is not higher, according to three sources familiar with the discussions at ICE and the White House.

A source familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president is getting “angry” that more people are not being deported and that the message is being passed along to “border czar” Tom Homan, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello.

“It’s driving him nuts they’re not deporting more people,” said the person familiar with Trump’s thinking.

[snip]

Meanwhile at ICE, Vitello told agents in January to aim to meet a daily quota of 1,200-1,400 arrests. According to numbers ICE has posted on X, the highest single day total since Trump was inaugurated was just 1,100, and the number has fallen since that day. On Tuesday of this week, arrests of immigrants were over 800, according to a source familiar with the numbers. But last weekend, there were only about 300 arrests, another source told NBC News.

In order to fulfill Trump’s Inauguration Day promise of “millions and millions” of deportations, the Trump administration would have to be deporting over 2,700 immigrants every day to reach 1 million in a year.

And, as NBC News has reported, arrests do not always equal immediate detentions, much less deportations. Of the more than 8,000 immigrants arrested in the first two weeks of the Trump administration, 461 were released, according to the White House.

Of course Trump is pissed that his biggest immigration success so far was stolen from Sleepy Joe Biden.

Of course Tom Homan is pissed that he can’t deliver what he promised.

Of course ICE is squirmy because even if they could meet their quotas — even if those migrants in Aurora, CO against whom ICE had no probable cause of a crime willingly opened their doors so ICE could arrest and deport them — the number of deportees would still fall far short of Trump’s goal.

But this all arises from the false expectations set during the election — from the lies Stephen Miller told, over and over and over and over and over, about the number of criminal migrants.

Trump is furious that his thugs can’t fulfill his promises. But those failures arise not through want of trying. Rather, those failures stem from the fact that reality in no way matches the hellhole Miller pitched for Trump, the imaginary hellhole Miller used to get voters afraid enough to vote for Trump.

Trump has redirected virtually all instruments of US national security to chase Stephen Miller’s lies. Not only is it going to lead to ongoing fury from the Boss, because reality will never match the propaganda Miller spun. But by neglecting the things that really do pose much more urgent threats — by destaffing investigations into real terrorists or operations to counter real ransomware attacks — Trump leaves America vulnerable in myriad ways.

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Stephen Miller Claimed Elon Musk Was the One Elected in November

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Yesterday, Stephen Miller RTed a propagandist’s attack on Jamie Raskin, in which he reframed Raskin’s legal points — that Congress has the power of the purse, that Elon Musk cannot eliminate agencies created by Congress — by suggesting they were an attack on DOGE’s [sic] efforts to “eliminat[e] waste and fraud.”

Miller suggested Democrats — defending the Constitution — hate democracy, because (Miller said) “voters have the right to elect a president to drain the permanent unelected DC swamp.”

With his RT, the Deputy Chief of Staff of Donald Trump’s White House suggested Elon had been elected.

Elon. Not Trump.

According to Politico, propagandists were posting this argument on Xitter, with Elon RTing them to assert his own legitimacy.

On X, Musk reposted accounts arguing Americans voted for Musk to play a major role in the Trump administration.

But there’s a big difference between Draino and Eric Daugherty suggesting that Elon, not Trump, was elected, and Stephen Miller doing so.

Meanwhile, this NYT article suggests that the White House isn’t in control of what Elon is doing.

Senior White House staff members have at times also found themselves in the dark, according to two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. One Trump official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Musk was widely seen as operating with a level of autonomy that almost no one can control.

[snip]

This time, however, he carries the authority of the president, who has bristled at some of Mr. Musk’s ready-fire-aim impulses but has praised him publicly.

“He’s a big cost-cutter,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go. But I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy.”

[snip]

Several former and current senior government officials — even those who like what he is doing — expressed a sense of helplessness about how to handle Mr. Musk’s level of unaccountability. At one point after another, Trump officials have generally relented rather than try to slow him down. Some hoped Congress would choose to reassert itself.

Mr. Trump himself sounded a notably cautionary note on Monday, telling reporters: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate, where not appropriate, we won’t.”

“If there’s a conflict,” he added, “then we won’t let him get near it.”

It depicts a fight that — last week — was pitched as proof that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had managed to limit Elon’s access to Trump by denying him an office in the West Wing as instead, at least as Elon tells it, a concession about office size.

At one point, Mr. Musk sought to sleep over in the White House residence. He sought and was granted an office in the West Wing but told people that it was too small. Since then, he has told friends he is reveling in the trappings of the opulent Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where he has worked some days.

And amid all that, it notes Elon’s ties to Miller, linking a story that focuses on immigration, not destroying government.

He has a close working relationship with Mr. Trump’s top policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who shares Mr. Musk’s contempt for much of the federal work force.

Now, for all its star power, this is not the article you should read to find out what’s going on in the agencies. Wired has, generally, been leading the pack on that front, having IDed the boys Elon has installed, confirmed one of those boys has control over Treasury’s payment systems, recorded the Musk boys’ platitudes about AI, and found that even after PEPFAR was exempted from USAID cuts, it remains unfunded. And if you want to understand where access by these boys to the government’s HR records will lead, read Mike Masnick.

But I want to compare the impotence portrayed by NYT — the refashioning of the office space fight, the anonymous confirmation that few if anyone in the White House know what Elon’s doing, the on the record quotes from a clueless Trump, a lying Karoline Leavitt, and … from Stephen Miller’s spouse, Katie, who has been installed in Elon’s group, that nothing will go wrong here — with the relative success of the two billionaires’ days yesterday.

Trump got his ass handed to him.

After promising big tariffs on our closest trading partners yesterday, he twice announced one month delays on the tariffs, tied to concessions that “Sleepy Joe Biden” actually negotiated, in one case four years ago. Worse still, both Claudia Sheinbaum and Justin Trudeau beat Trump to the microphone, and in Canada’s case, their Ambassador showed up on Fox News to make it clear Canada already agreed to the things Trump was hailing as a big concession, while Biden was still President. Better yet, some journalists have learned the lesson of the Colombia “negotiation,” in which the same thing happened. Leavitt’s lies about concessions may get less and less effective, moving forward, each time she tries to claim that Trump is some great dealmaker.

I suspect that between the time Trump announced tariffs and the time he capitulated, Senators and possibly even Rupert Murdoch told him how insane the tariffs were. I further suspect that these discussions involved a quid pro quo, perhaps tying a Susan Collins vote for Tulsi Gabbard, for example, in exchange for a reversal on tariffs that might affect Maine.

However Trump was talked off that cliff, he got his ass handed to him.

He didn’t even entirely succeed at claiming this was a fight over immigration and fentanyl trafficking, when that excuse was obvious bullshit as it pertains to Canada.

The one bright spot of his day was making a big announcement about a Sovereign Wealth Fund, yet another piece of paper Stephen Miller handed him to sign, probably, but a promise that, like the plan to annex Canada and purchase Greenland, remains unfunded and undiscussed in heated talks in the House and Senate about how to do reconciliation.

As I suggested Friday, so long as Stephen Miller keeps handing Trump papers to sign, he seems content to imagine he’s the President.

Meanwhile, Elon did succeed in getting the Trump-whisperers at NYT to accept that his attack on bureaucracy, which started with an agency with a $40 billion budget, 1% of government expenditures, and has never glanced at the agency with an $800 billion budget that has never passed an audit.

Mr. Musk has told Trump administration officials that to fulfill their mission of radically reducing the size of the federal government, they need to gain access to the computers — the systems that house the data and the details of government personnel, and the pipes that distribute money on behalf of the federal government.

Mr. Musk has been thinking radically about ways to sharply reduce federal spending for the entire presidential transition. After canvassing budget experts, he eventually became fixated on a critical part of the country’s infrastructure: the Treasury Department payment system that disburses trillions of dollars a year on behalf of the federal government.

Mr. Musk has told administration officials that he thinks they could balance the budget if they eliminate the fraudulent payments leaving the system, according to an official who discussed the matter with him. It is unclear what he is basing that statement on. The federal deficit for 2024 was $1.8 trillion. The Government Accountability Office estimated in a report that the government made $236 billion in improper payments — three-quarters of which were overpayments — across 71 federal programs during the 2023 fiscal year.

[snip]

In private conversations, Mr. Musk has told friends that he considers the ultimate metric for his success to be the number of dollars saved per day, and he is sorting ideas based on that ranking.

“The more I have gotten to know President Trump, the more I like him. Frankly, I love the guy,” Mr. Musk said in a live audio conversation on X early Monday morning. “This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have.”

This is ridiculous garbage, as are Elon’s daily claims of money he has saved (which NYT accedes elsewhere). You’re not going to eliminate the deficit by shutting down USAID. You will, however, cut off a lot of funding to Ukraine, with Russia laughing gleefully as it watches. As Elon moves onto reviewing individual employees, you’ll cut off employees who’ll have to be replaced by more expensive contractors.

You won’t cut spending appreciably.

Nothing Elon is doing will balance the budget. Nothing Elon is doing will make government more efficient. Hell, his AI boys can’t even tell the difference between a condom and a hospital, and as a direct result, Trump keeps making transparently bogus claims about Gaza funding.

But as we try to get a sense of where the attacks on democracy are coming from, it’s worth noting that the first thing that happened — before the Senate installed one after another of Trumps’ wildly unqualified nominees, and before Congressional Republicans have decided how to defund government themselves — Elon has gone in and started changing code at government agencies, and done so with feeble claims of approval from the White House.

Meanwhile, people who seem to answer to Miller — people like Acting DC US Attorney Ed Martin, one of three January 6 insurrectionists salted through government so far — appear to be working for Elon, not Trump.

Update, February 5: Both NBC and Atlantic are reporting that Susie Wiles claims to be in charge of what Elon is doing.

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Mark Zuckerberg Agrees to Turn Meta [Back] into a Pogrom Machine

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According to WSJ, Meta has agreed to pay $25 million to lose the frivolous lawsuit Trump launched after Facebook exercised its prerogative under the First Amendment not to platform Trump’s insurrection anymore in 2021.

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay roughly $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit that President Trump brought against the company and its CEO after the social-media platform suspended his accounts following the attack on the U.S. Capitol that year, according to people familiar with the agreement.

Of that, $22 million will go toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library, with the rest going to legal fees and the other plaintiffs who signed on to the case. Meta won’t admit wrongdoing, the people said. Trump signed the settlement agreement Wednesday in the Oval Office.

A Meta spokesman confirmed the settlement.

[snip]

Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended in 2021 because of posts he made around Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob stormed the Capitol building. In the days leading up to the attack and on Jan. 6, he repeatedly used the platforms to make false claims that he won the 2020 election and alleged widespread election fraud that was denied by the administration’s top election-security experts and attorneys.

Zuckerberg, at the time, said the risks of the president’s using the social-media platforms during that period “are simply too great” and then paused the president’s accounts for two weeks. The pause was subsequently lengthened.

Most people — including Elizabeth Warren, in the WSJ story — are focusing on how this is effectively a bribe, a $22 million donation (on top of the earlier $1 million one) trading for regulatory favors. It is. Trump continues to engage in unprecedented corruption in plain sight.

But it is more than that. The concession of the settlement implies that Facebook should not have banned Trump for using their platform to incite an insurrection, though it admits no wrong-doing.

I have repeatedly argued that if Twitter, along with Facebook, had not shut down Trump’s account after January 6, there was a good chance that Joe Biden would never have been inaugurated.

Mark Zuckerberg’s capitulation makes it far less likely Meta will do the same thing — take action against Trump’s account to prevent him from stoking ongoing violence — again. It makes it virtually certain that Meta will not police inciteful content involving Trump without buy-in from the top, from Zuck.

And that, along with Meta’s earlier capitulations to Stephen Miller to rejigger its algorithms to allow transphobic and other dehumanizing speech — which experts predicted would lead to the kind of violence Facebook fostered in Myanmar — means that when Trump next uses these platforms to incite violence, he’s far less likely to be shut down.

Heck, John Roberts has even provided guidelines to Trump on how to ensure such incitement will be an official act and therefore immune from any future prosecution. Trump simply needs to involve his top aides — someone like Stephen Miller — in crafting a post, and Trump will be able to say that John Roberts told him that Trump never goes to prison for it.

Stephen Miller has, for some time, been laser focused on re-weaponizing social media. He is suspected to be the one who pitched Musk on bringing “the boss himself, if you’re up for that!” back onto Xitter.

Then, last summer, Miller attempted to intervene in Trump’s document case when Jack Smith asked Aileen Cannon to prevent Trump from falsely claiming the FBI tried to assassinate him because it issued routine use of force guidelines for the search of Mar-a-Lago. Miller argued that Trump’s false claims on social media about the FBI — earlier ones of which had already led to a violent attack on the FBI — were not incitement and constituted important speech for the election.

The only possible constitutional exception to free speech the government has identified is incitement. But it cannot rely on that exception to justify infringing President Trump’s rights. President Trump has not engaged in speech that “prepare[s] a group for violent action [or] steel[s] it to such action.” Brandenburg, 395 U.S. at 448. It cannot be said that by merely criticizing—or, even as some may argue, mischaracterizing—the government’s actions and intentions in executing a search warrant at his residence, President Trump is advocating for violence or lawlessness, let alone inciting imminent action. The government’s own exhibits prove the point. See generally ECF Nos. 592-1, 592-2. 592-3, 592-5. The government presents no evidence that President Trump advocated a violent attack or other lawless action against the Department of Justice, the FBI, President Biden, this Court, any witness, or any other person. Much less has the government proved a call to arms or any request, demand, instruction, or implication that supporters should violate any law.

And all this is happening after Trump pulled the security detail from several people — most notably Anthony Fauci and Mark Milley — who’ve long been targeted, the latter by Iranian terrorists as well as Trump’s people. Indeed, one of the attacks Smith focused on in his successful DC bid for a gag was Trump’s attack suggesting Milley should be executed.

This is not just about eliciting a bribe for regulatory favors. It is not just about winning an argument about actions taken four years ago to halt an insurrection in process.

The entire lawsuit is about an ongoing chilling effect. And Zuck’s capitulation is a capitulation to that chill, a soft commitment that the next time Trump uses social media to launch his mob against vulnerable targets like trans people or legal Haitian immigrants, against co-equal branches of government in Congress or the courts, or against his select targets like Milley, Meta will do nothing to slow the mob.

For years, Stephen Miller has been perfecting the use of social media to sow fascism. And he just cowed one of the richest men in the world to make it a more effective tool for fascism.

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