“Tariffs will put your jobs at risk:” The Make-Believe Justification for Trump’s Trade War

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Tomorrow, tariffs will either go into place targeting Canada, Mexico, and China — creating a recession for at least our closest trading partners, devastating the auto industry, and likely leading to a stock sell-off — or Trump will back down.

This may or may not be the most destructive thing Trump did in the last week, but because it’ll elicit quicker pushback from businesses and Republican members of Congress, it may create an early opportunity to push back on Trump’s unconstitutional power grabs.

And that’s why it matters that a number of media outlets are both burying the stated excuse for the tariffs and debunking that stated excuse as a lie. As described in the Fact Sheet announcing the sanctions, Trump is purportedly invoking a national emergency under IEEPA to impose the sanctions.

ADDRESSING AN EMERGENCY SITUATION: The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

  • Until the crisis is alleviated, President Donald J. Trump is implementing a 25% additional tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10% additional tariff on imports from China. Energy resources from Canada will have a lower 10% tariff.
  • President Trump is taking bold action to hold Mexico, Canada, and China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.

Yet Trump’s claims about the scope of the problem are false. As NPR notes, both Trump and Karoline Leavitt have lied about the scope of the fentanyl deaths.

On Inauguration Day, Trump said foreign drug cartels are “killing 250,000 [or] 300,000 American people per year.” On Friday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said tariffs are warranted because fentanyl has “killed tens of millions of Americans.”

These claims are false.

Nevertheless, outlets are barely contesting the claims. WaPo included these observations in ¶¶5 and 16 of an article on the tariffs.

Trump has framed the levies as a response to an “invasion” of migrants and fentanyl across the nation’s northern and southern borders.

[snip]

But Trump administration officials doubled down Sunday, citing migrants and drugs to justify the new tariffs.

“Canada has some work to do as far as helping us secure our northern border,” Kristi L. Noem, the secretary of homeland security, told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Canada can help us, or they can get in the way, and they will face the consequences of it. … If prices go up, it’s because of other people’s reactions to America’s laws.”

And NYT put this paragraph in ¶10 of a story on the tariffs.

Mr. Trump has said that the tariffs are intended to reduce the flow of the deadly opioid fentanyl over the border, as well as of migrants. (The traffic of both people and illegal drugs from Canada is, however, very small.)

CNN more specifically notes that only 43 of the 21,000 pounds of fentanyl seized last year came through Canada (effectively, Trump’s Fact Sheet blames Canada for drugs that transited Mexico).

According to US Customs and Border Protection statistics, only 43 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the northern border last year, compared with more than 21,000 pounds captured at the southwest border. And Canada has already pledged to spend $1 billion on an enhanced border patrol operation.

Which is what Justin Trudeau said in a celebrated speech responding to the tariffs: less than 1% of the fentanyl and 1% of the illegal crossing into the US come from Canada (which NPR included in its article debunking the claim).

CNN does not, however, correct a claim offered by supporters (and the Fact Sheet announcing the tariffs): That Colombia caved after refusing a military transport with deportees.

His supporters insist it works — citing Colombia’s retreat last week, in a showdown over migrant deportations, under the threat of economy-destroying US tariffs.

It didn’t work. At least thus far, deportations have been done via Colombian military planes, not US military transports. And Colombia has loudly announced that none of those being deported were criminals.

Two Colombian air force planes landed Tuesday in Bogota with more than 200 of the migrants, many of them women and children. Petro welcomed them with a post on X, saying they are now “free” and “in a country that loves them.”

Colombian Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo said none of the 200 Colombians who were returned on Tuesday had criminal records in the U.S. or Colombia.

“Migrants are not criminals,” Petro wrote. “They are human beings who want to work and get ahead in life.”

One of the migrants, José Montaña of Medellín, said they were put in chains on the earlier U.S. flights. “We were shackled from our feet, our ankles to our hips, like criminals,” Montaña said. “There were women whose kids had to see their moms shackled like they were drug traffickers.”

And of course, this entire fiasco is built off a bigger lie: Trump’s claims to be reversing Joe Biden’s policies, and not his own. A mere seven years ago, Trump declared that the revision to NAFTA he negotiated was the best trade deal ever.

That is, Trump is violating his own deal, something else Trudeau emphasized in his comments.

They will violate the free trade agreement that the president and I, along with our Mexican partner, negotiated and signed a few years ago.

And fundamentally, there’s no reason to believe Trump wants to address drug trafficking. One of the first things he did, after all, was to grant a full pardon to Ross Ulbricht. At sentencing, the government tied his trafficking to at least six deaths, including several heroin deaths (and of course he was accused, though never prosecuted, for arranging hit men).

The vast majority of items for sale on Silk Road were illegal drugs, which were openly advertised as such on the site. As of Sept. 23, 2013, the Silk Road home page displayed nearly 13,000 listings for controlled substances, listed under such categories as “Cannabis,” “Dissociatives,” “Ecstasy,” “Intoxicants,” “Opioids,” “Precursors,” “Prescription,” “Psychedelics,” and “Stimulants.” From November 2011 to September 2013, law enforcement agents made more than 60 individual undercover purchases of controlled substances from Silk Road vendors. These purchases included heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD, among other illegal drugs, and were filled by vendors believed to be located in more than ten different countries, including the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Austria, and France.

The narcotics distributed on Silk Road have been linked to at least six overdose deaths across the world. These overdose deaths include: Jordan M., a 27-year-old Microsoft employee who was found unresponsive in front of his computer, which was logged onto Silk Road at the time, and died as a result of heroin and other prescription drugs that he had ordered from Silk Road; and Preston B., from Perth, Australia, and Alejandro N., from Camino, California, both 16-years-old, died as a result of taking 25i-NBOMe, a powerful synthetic drug designed to mimic LSD (commonly referred to as “N-Bomb”), which was purchased from Silk Road. Additional victims include: Bryan B., a 25-year-old from Boston, Massachusetts and Scott W., a 36-year-old from Australia, who both died as a result of heroin purchased from Silk Road; and Jacob B., a 22-year-old from Australia, who died from health complications that were aggravated by the use of drugs purchased from Silk Road.

Trump is declaring an emergency, including against Canada, solely in an attempt to make an illegal power grab, to defy his own law.

And yet few are pointing to the fact that his emergency is based on inflated claims about fentanyl deaths and wildly false claims about Canada’s involvement in all of that.

Update: Claudia Sheinbaum has already gotten Trump to back down, pausing tariffs for a month. She’ll deploy troops to the border (as Sam Stein noted on Xitter, they have done this repeatedly in the past without tariff threats). Trump will claim to crack down on weapons being trafficked from the US to Mexico. And they’ll continue discussions about security and trade.

Some of the Ways Trump’s Immigrant Invader Damaged America in Just Two Weeks

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I think one effect of Trump’s attempt to wow journalists with the appearance of action is to hide how many major fuck-ups and failed promises Trump has had in his first two weeks (like the serial confession that Trump and Stephen Miller lied to voters about how many criminal aliens there are and Trump’s equivocations about multiple of the tariffs he will set).

But one locus of many of the worst failures comes from this unelected immigrant.

Among the things that African immigrant Elon Musk has done in the last few weeks was:

Forced FAA’s head, Michael Whitaker, out days before a fatal crash. As the Verge explained, Elon took Whitaker out because he deigned to regulate Musk’s companies.

But Musk’s efforts to get Whitaker were well known even before Trump’s victory in November. He has complained many times about the FAA, lashing out in September after the agency levied a $633,000 fine for launching missions with unapproved changes. (Musk is worth over $400 billion, making him the richest man in the world.)

The FAA has also fined Starlink, after the SpaceX subsidiary failed to submit safety data before launching satellites in 2022. In a House hearing, Whitaker explained that the FAA’s civil penalties were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.”

On X, Musk complained that the FAA was “harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts.” He also claimed that humans would never land on Mars without “radical reform at the FAA.” In September, he wrote “he needs to resign” about Whitaker.

Elon also pushed out the guy who manages America’s checkbook, David Lebryk, in whom a lot of the confidence of investors and businessmen is invested.

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.

[snip]

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

Musk’s flunkies, including one 18-year old with only a high school diploma, have also been installed in the Office of Personnel Management [corrected] — the government’s HR department.

Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall.

Scott Kupor, a managing partner at the powerful investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, stands as Trump’s nominee to run the OPM. But already in place, according to sources, are a variety of people who seem ready to carry out Musk’s mission of cutting staff and disrupting the government.

Amanda Scales is, as has been reported, the new chief of staff at the OPM. She formerly worked in talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, according to her LinkedIn. Before that, she was part of the talent and operations team at Human Capital, a venture firm with investments in the defense tech startup Anduril and the political betting platform Kalshi; before that, she worked for years at Uber. Her placement in this key role, experts believe, seems part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool.

Sources say that Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at the OPM as a senior adviser to the director. (Steve Davis, the CEO of the Boring Company, is rumored to be advising Musk on cuts to be made via DOGE and was integral in Musk’s gutting of Twitter, now X, after his takeover of the company in 2022.)

According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages.

One thing they’ve done is set up a government-wide email function.

Last week, many federal workers received test emails from the email address [email protected]. In a lawsuit filed last night, plaintiffs allege that a new email list started by the Trump administration may be compromising the data of federal employees.

In their attempts to set up agency- and government-wide emails, Elon’s unelected bureaucrats seem to have taken security filters off at least NOAA’s email system, resulting in noxious spam being sent.

After setting up the government-wide email, someone sent out an email similar to the one Elon sent out when he gutted Xitter, attempting to fool government workers into accepting something misleadingly labeled a buy-out, one not authorized by statute or appropriation.

In a separate email sent on Tuesday entitled “Fork in the Road,” most federal workers were effectively offered an eight-month severance package to leave their jobs, simply by sending [email protected] a message with the word “Resign” in the subject line between now and February 6. Military personnel, postal workers, and national-security and immigration officials are not eligible.

The executive branch has no authority from Congress to offer a mass buyout to federal workers. In fact, the OPM website clearly states that the limit for incentive packages for voluntary resignations is $25,000, far less than eight months’ pay for the average federal worker. Some employees can’t even be offered that.

The way OPM purports to get around this is by defining this as “deferred resignation.” The resignation of the federal worker would be set at September 30, and they will retain full pay and benefits until then and be exempt from return-to-office requirements that are part of one of the Trump executive orders. (This is also a way to not unlawfully reduce salary outlays in federal appropriations for the current fiscal year.) “I understand my employing agency will likely make adjustments in response to my resignation including moving, eliminating, consolidating, reassigning my position and tasks, reducing my official duties, and/or placing me on paid administrative leave until my resignation date,” reads the sample resignation letter. In this sense it is just a future setting of an end date of employment, though the strong implication is that those employees will have nothing to do for the next eight months.

[snip]

This was an Elon Musk operation, through and through. In fact, the “Fork in the Road” email had the same title as one that Elon Musk sent to Twitter when he took over there, informing workers to be “extremely hardcore” or take the resignation offer. The Twitter emails even included the same ask of workers to reply with their decision.

All this access — and almost certainly, some shitty AI — is where the big lie Karoline Leavitt told in her first presser came from.

MS. LEAVITT: There was notice. It was the executive order that the president signed.

There’s also a freeze on hiring, as you know; a regulatory freeze; and there’s also a freeze on foreign aid. And this is a — again, incredibly important to ensure that this administration is taking into consideration how hard the American people are working. And their tax dollars actually matter to this administration.

You know, just during this pause, DOGE and OMB have actually found that there was $37 million that was about to go out the door to the World Health Organization, which is an organization, as you all know, that President Trump, with the swipe of his pen in that executive order, is — no longer wants the United States to be a part of. So, that wouldn’t be in line with the president’s agenda.

DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.

Jesse Watters picked up Leavitt’s lie, which in turn led Trump to parrott Watters’ expanded version of it.

It’s possible flunkies installed by African immigrant Elon Musk mistook Africa for the Middle East (of which only Jordan gets contraceptives), because Africa receives condoms from the US (as part of the important PEPFAR anti-AIDS program that even Republican Senators were demanding be resumed when it got shut down).

And this is just what we already know! While it hasn’t been confirmed, I’d bet a good deal of money that Elon’s flunkies were behind shutting down the Medicaid portals early in the week, something that affected health care for people throughout the country.

It has been spectacular failure after failure.

And many of them were directly caused by the immigrant demanding that we get rid of unelected bureaucrats taking democracy away.

How Senate Judiciary Committee Dems Fucked Up the Kash Patel Nomination Hearing

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I have always said I think it likely Kash Patel will be confirmed. But that shouldn’t have made yesterday’s confirmation hearing pointless. Democrats did that on their own, though a combination of inadequate preparation and absence of leadership.

Dems tried to demonstrate Kash’s manifest lack of fitness for the job in three ways:

  • Pointing to all the attacks on law enforcement he made on random podcasts
  • Probing his role in disseminating the January 6 choir
  • Dancing around his invocation of the Fifth in the Jack Smith investigation

Pointing to all the attacks on law enforcement he made on random podcasts

Kash dealt with the first line of attack — his incendiary comments on social media — by claiming that his comments were taken out of context.

The only time such claims made any sense, when he tried to spin his complaints about the January 6 response, should have led to detailed follow-up of all the ways his testimony conflicts with every other witness on January 6. Kash even, yesterday, doubled the number of National Guard he claims Trump authorized, a claim that is debunked by the testimony of multiple pro-Trump witnesses. And even if his claims were true (he blames and blamed Ryan McCarthy for the delay in Guard response on January 6) means that his own leadership was faulty. At the very least, committee Democrats should have asked whether he was implicated in Barry Loudermilk’s insinuation that the failure to deploy the Guard was contemptuous.

Similarly, when Kash disclaimed remembering far right podcast host Stew Peters and Dick Durbin noted that Kash had appeared on the show eight times, Durbin should have followed up and asked what kind of compromise such promiscuity could cause an FBI Director.

Probing his role in disseminating the January 6 choir

There were many questions about Kash’s role in promoting the January 6 choir — but in spite of a conflict with Adam Schiff over the meaning of “we,” no one ever got Kash explain who did do the rest (though Adam Schiff did state that Kash had done no due diligence before pushing the video).

This matters, because some of Kash’s buddies (including conspiracy theorist Julie Kelly) routinely make false claims about rioters, and finding the source of Kash’s false claims is important to his warped reality going forward.

But the entire thrust of these questions was hampered by the point I made here and here: they relied on a superficial understanding, based off press releases rather than court dockets, of who these people were.

Schiff asked Kash if he promoted a video showing assailants attacking FBI agents, would it make him unfit to be Director. Why not, then, focus directly on the gun that Barton Shively grabbed when probation officers showed up, precisely the kind of thing that has gotten FBI agents killed in recent years.

And if you want to persuade — or at least, embarrass — your Republican colleagues, why not make it clear that the violent rioters under discussion didn’t just attack cops, but they threatened to drag people like Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham through the streets? Kash didn’t just promote people who attacked cops, he promoted people who wanted to attack members of the Committee.

Dancing around his invocation of the Fifth in the Jack Smith investigation

It’s on Kash’s invocation of the Fifth that I’m most upset, because Democrats may have forfeited the opportunity to make this a scandal going forward.

It started strongly enough. Cory Booker first raised it, and got Kash to claim he wanted his grand jury testimony released, after which Booker tried — but failed — to get Kash to elaborate on his testimony. Later, Schiff returned to the question and asked whether he supported getting both his grand jury transcripts and any mention of him in Volume Two, which led to what were probably Kash’s angriest looks of the hearing.

But after that, in the second round, a number of senators returned to the issue, mangling the grand jury standard by falsely saying that if Kash consents to the release of the transcript it can be released, and focusing primarily on the transcript and not the report (the latter of which made his eyes bug out when Schiff raised it).

This is the kind of thing you need to coordinate! This is the kind of thing where the actual grand jury rules matter! This is the kind of thing where the McGann precedent matters! 

And this is the kind of thing that demanded a coordinated set of yes or no questions about Kash’s testimony, because yesterday’s hearing was the one opportunity Dems will ever have to force him to answer question about what he told the grand jury.

All the more so because, it appears, Dems haven’t done what they should have to make an issue of the report (I first described the import of it to this confirmation on January 13).

On Wednesday — literally the day before the hearing — Dems wrote a letter to Acting Attorney General James McHenry asking for the report. While the letter referenced Dick Durbin asking Pam Bondi about it buried on page 41 of her Questions for the Record, that question did not tie the request to the need to advise and consent on confirmations. Tuesday’s letter nevertheless pointed to that question to claim that Aileen Cannon should have known about it.

On January 23, 2025, the Committee issued a “Notice of Committee Nomination Hearing” for Mr. Patel, which is now scheduled for January 30, 2025. The Ranking Member of the Committee submitted on January 16, 2025, Questions for the Record (QFR) to Attorney General nominee Pamela Jo Bondi following her confirmation hearing, requesting that she commit to making Volume Two of the Special Counsel’s report available immediately for review to the Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, Ranking Member, or their designees.2

This formal request preceded an order issued several days later by a judge in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida that enjoined the Department from releasing or otherwise making available a redacted version of Volume Two of the Special Counsel’s report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. In the order, the judge erroneously stated that “[t]here is no record of an official request by members of Congress for in camera review of Volume II as proposed by the Department in this case,” despite the prior request which her order omits. The judge also concludes wrongly that the Department “identified no pending legislation on the subject or any legislative activity that could be aided, even indirectly, by dissemination of Volume II to the four specified members whom the Department believes should review Volume II now,” notwithstanding the Committee’s ongoing consideration of Mr. Patel and others’ nominations.3

2 Senate Judiciary Committee, Questions for the Record the Honorable Pamela Jo Bondi Nominee to be Attorney General of the United States, (Jan. 16, 2025), https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2025-01-15_- _qfr_responses_-_bondi.pdf

3 United States v. Trump, No. 9:23-cr-80101, (S.D. Fla. Jan. 21, 2025) ECF No. 714 at 7; In addition, on January 13, 2025, Senator Dick Durbin, Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the other Democratic members of the Committee submitted a letter to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland “recogniz[ing[ the current injunction against the release of Special Counsel Smith’s report and related materials and reserv[ing] its right to request production of the report and relevant records at an appropriate future date.” Senate Judiciary Committee Letter Requesting Preservation of DOJ documents (Jan. 13, 2025), https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20DOJ%20on%20Records%20Preservation.pdf

This falls short of informing Cannon, however, and submitting an urgent request for the report in conjunction with this confirmation the day before the hearing is rather late, particularly since Grassley might try to push through the confirmation before the stated due date for the report, February 10 (which is still before Cannon’s injunction runs out).

Given Kash’s glare, I’m pretty confident that the report will suggest Kash prevaricated before the grand jury. I even suspect we’ll eventually get some semblance of the report (I also think DOJ’s efforts to fire everyone who might have a copy, on Friday, before they moved to dismiss the case against Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, on Monday, while a transparent attempt to prevent its release, may be inadequate to that effort).

I think that if the report comes out, it will become clear that the delay in releasing it served primarily to preserve Kash’s nomination chances. I think that it’s likely not to happen before he is confirmed, but I think if that happens after Kash’s confirmation, it can be made a key demonstration of the corruption inherent to Trump’s DOJ.

But Democrats have not done the things they needed to do to to make that a scandal.

Trump’s DOJ is involved in a cover-up as we speak, a cover-up designed to hide how the aspiring FBI Director was complicit in Trump’s efforts to retain classified documents in his insecure basement. But Democrats have not done what they need to do to impose a cost for that cover-up.

Kash disclaims the purge in process

Cory Booker was perhaps the bright spot of the day. In addition to first raising Kash’s role in the documents investigation, he got Kash to disclaim knowledge of a purge in process, in which at least six senior FBI agents were pushed out, during the hearing.

This is another thing that may be turned into a scandal going forward.

Compile this video

As this post makes clear, most of these Senators are quite proud of their testy confrontations with Kash. They’ve sent them out individually.

It’s not too late to make use of them. Democrats can and should put together three videos focused on each of these topics. Intersperse Kash’s claim to stand by cops with video of those he celebrated attacking them. Intersperse Kash’s disavowal of the Neo-Nazis he has been sidling up to with what he said on their shows. And make a video of all the times Kash claimed to want to release his testimony with a focus on the effort to cover it up.

Kash Patel is almost certainly going to be confirmed. And he will almost certainly be a catastrophic appointee. So Dems need to do far more than they did yesterday to impose a cost going forward on his pick — one that, especially, will make it easier to demonstrate the corruption of his installation.

Judge AliKhan Didn’t Halt Trump’s Funding Freeze Alone, Democracy Forward Did Too

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Update: As Marisa Kabas and others have reported, OMB has rescinded the memo. Those involved here won this round.

Yesterday, just minutes after Trump’s freeze on a great deal of federal funding was about to go into effect, Judge Loren AliKhan ordered a temporary stay of Trump’s order — through Monday at 5PM — to consider a request for an emergency Temporary Restraining Order submitted in a challenge to the order. Here’s Judge AliKhan’s order halting Trump’s effort to steal money Congress ordered him to spend.

The Court orders an administrative stay through 5PM on February 3rd to maintain the status quo and allow for full consideration of Plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order.

Here’s the CourtListener docket.

Because there’s a great deal of doomerism, because a lot of people spent yesterday wailing, “Why doesn’t anyone do anything,” I think it crucially important to lay out who did what, so people can understand the agency involved.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are, as described in the complaint, are:

National Council of Nonprofits (“NCN”) is the largest network of nonprofit organizations in North America, with more than 30,000 organizational members. National Council of Nonprofits (“NCN”) supports nonprofits in advancing their missions by identifying emerging trends, sharing proven practices, and promoting solutions that benefit charitable nonprofits and the communities they serve. (Here’s a flyer they did Monday on the impact of Trump’s Executive Orders and here is their core values page.) To the extent that journalists are giving credit (they’re not, except to Judge AliKhan), NCN will be the named plaintiff.

American Public Health Association (“APHA”) is a nonpartisan, non-profit organization that champions the health of all people and all communities; strengthens the profession of public health; shares the latest research and information; promotes best practices; and advocates for public health issues and policies grounded in scientific research. APHA represents more than 23,000 individual members, who reside in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, and also has 52 state and regional affiliates. APHA is the only organization that combines a 150-year perspective, a broad-based member community, and the ability to influence federal policy to improve the public’s health. (Here’s their about page.)

Main Street Alliance (“MSA”) is a national network of small businesses, which represents approximately 30,000 small businesses across the United States. MSA helps small business owners realize their full potential as leaders for a just future that prioritizes good jobs, equity, and community through organizing, research, and policy advocacy on behalf of small businesses. MSA also seeks to amplify the voices of its small business membership by sharing their experiences with the aim of creating an economy where all small business owners have an equal opportunity to succeed. MSA’s small business members compete for and receive various forms of what is broadly defined as “federal financial assistance,” including funding in the form of grants, loans, and loan guarantees. Members also benefit directly from other recipients of federal financial assistance being able to purchase goods and services from them as a result of federal programs. (Here’s their about page.)

SAGE is a New York nonprofit corporation. SAGE is dedicated to improving the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults.

Note, I’ve lifted this language directly from the complaint, which emphasizes that this battle pits an organization that tries to help non-profits work effectively and another that supports public health professionals, along with a number of small businesses. There’s an LGBTQ group in there, which (along with some services provided by the APHA) supports a First Amendment challenge to the way the OMB member specifically targeted “transgenderism.”

The Memo purports to pause all disbursements through federal financial assistance programs pending a “review” to determine whether they are “consistent with the President’s policies” as expressed in several executive orders, such as one announcing that “[f]ederal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.” The Memo further indicates that the review should identify recipients of federal funding that “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.”

But even the lawsuit also focuses main street stuff, like keeping small businesses afloat. This group of plaintiffs were presumably chosen to represent both interests that matter to right wingers, but also interests that have a specific complaint based on the way OMB wrote its memo (particularly its focus on Trans people).

Importantly, these groups have legal standing (because they get federal grants); members of Congress do not, which is one of several reasons why civil society is leading this fight. Here’s how the complaint describes NCN’s injuries arising from the halt in funding.

Many of NCN’s members rely on federal grants and financial assistance to serve their missions, from supporting research and services to those with cancer and other serious diseases, to assisting people in escaping domestic violence, to providing mental health care and suicide hotlines. Federal grants and financial assistance are the lifeblood of operations and programs for many of these nonprofits, and even a short pause in funding—which, for many NCN members, is already in the pipeline—could deprive people and communities of their life-saving services. Nonprofits often make budget decisions two to five years in advance, and they make business decisions based on expected cash inflow just as any for-profit enterprise would: making staffing decisions, setting organizational priorities, providing essential services and programs, and identifying and working towards fundraising goals. They rely on federal funds to fund entire programs, including salaries. Halting this funding would lead to pauses of important community programs, food and safety assistance, and lifesaving research, among other things: even a short pause could be devastating, decimating organizations, costing lives, and leaving neighbors without the services they need.

Finally, the real agency here: The suit was filed by Democracy Forward, which is in the business of litigating on issues like this. Here’s their client list. In other words, this is a lawsuit brought by a legal organization that found plaintiffs who’ll well represent the harm that cutting of federal funding will do to America, and do so in ways that personify what this attack is about.

Democracy Forward is part of a group, Democracy 2025, formed last year to challenge Trump’s assault on democracy.

So the plaintiffs are here because they have standing and because they’ll be able to tell compelling stories about the injury they’ve suffered. Democracy Forward will be doing the heavy lifting of fighting this legally.

One reason I’m making this point is to emphasize the import of civil society, including groups that have been preparing for these legal challenges for months. As I and others have pointed out, the battle over fascism often centers on the battle over pre-existing networks of civil society, networks that often are not themselves political.

And sustain or build your networks. Not just your political networks, the folks with whom you’ve worked to try to elect Kamala Harris or restore reproductive rights. But your other networks, too. Sometimes, after fascists break political networks, it’s the choirs or the knitting clubs where civic discourse can regrow.

The very first thing authoritarians try to break are the networks of civil society, because isolated people are easier to terrify. So make sure yours are as strong as they can be before the wrecking crew comes.

Here, civil society stood up, asserted its membership in a society linking small businesses in rural communities to aging LGBTQ people, and succeeded, for now, in pausing Trump’s attack on parts of civil society that Russ Vought and Acting OMB Director Matthew Vaeth are attacking.

In those moments you’re feeling particularly helpless, you might focus your energy on shoring up the strength of civil society within your own local community, even if it’s no more than the knitting club.

It is likely auspicious that Judge AliKhan — a recent Biden appointee who worked for years as an Attorney for District of Columbia — was randomly assigned to the case. But all she has done, so far, is preserve the status quo. The NGOs, from the service providers to the lawyers, are the people who scrambled to prevent the implementation of the order last night at 5PM.

One more point about agency. The lawsuit cites to the copy of the memo published by WaPo in its story on the halt. But as WaPo credited, it was not the first to report on the memo; independent journalist Marisa Kabas first posted it on Bluesky.

Things are definitely dire. But there are people — from journalists to NGOs to lawyers — who are doing their jobs to push back against Trump’s authoritarian attack. And it’s important to see that NGO networks are one of the most important bulwarks against such authoritarian attacks.

After Yesterday’s DOJ Purge, Pam Bondi Cannot Fulfill Promises Made at Her Confirmation Hearing

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Among the many things that happened in the ongoing DOJ purge was the reassignment of DOJ’s top career official, Brad Weinsheimer, to Trump’s sanctuary cities task force.

The department’s most senior career official, a well-respected department employee responsible for some of the most sensitive cases, was reassigned to a much less powerful post.

Were that official, Bradley Weinsheimer, to remain as the associate deputy attorney general, he would have handled critical questions about possible recusals — a thorny issue for a department that will soon be run by a number of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers.

[snip]

Like many of the other officials who have received transfer emails, Mr. Weinsheimer has been given the option of moving to the department’s sanctuary cities task force — an offer seen by some in the same situation as an effort to force them into quitting.

Mr. Weinsheimer, a respected veteran of the department for three decades, played a critical role under multiple administrations, often acting as a critical arbiter of ethical issues or interactions that required a neutral referee.

He was appointed to his current role on an interim basis by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in July 2018 during Mr. Trump’s first term, a move that was made permanent by one of his successors, William P. Barr.

Mr. Weinsheimer also served four years in the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates complaints about prosecutors. An email to his government account was not immediately returned.

I’ve written about the key role Weinsheimer has played here.

In response to a question from Dick Durbin about her lobbying for Qatar (which she did not disclose as a potential conflict to the committee),

If there are any conflicts with anyone I represented in private practice, I would consult with the career ethics officials within the department and make the appropriate decision.

When Durbin asked if she would face a conflict with private prison contractor GEO, Bondi again said she would “consult with the career ethics officials within the Department of Justice and make the appropriate decision.”

But now the DOJ purge has made that impossible. Weinsheimer will be stuck prosecuting Chicago officials somewhere, and someone hand selected will take his spot.

In Bondi’s case, it won’t matter. She is, at least, qualified for the job, unlike so many of Trump’s other nominees.

But a key promise she made in her confirmation hearing just became meaningless.

Update: Fixed my typo to state correctly that it will be impossible for Bondi to keep her promise.

Stephen Miller Confesses that Trump Lied about Immigrants

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After getting caught boasting last week because ICE was detaining the same number of people as Joe Biden’s Administration, the Administration has now imposed quotas — demanding that ICE arrest up to 1,500 migrants a day, which WaPo may have been the first to report.

Johnny Maga, a far right propagandist who never tires of looking like a stupid idiot, reported that with great excitement. Quotas!!!

Not so Stephen Miller. He got pissy that WaPo described, in both the subhed and in paragraph after paragraph of the report, that this will lead ICE to arrest non-criminals. Here’s how WaPo described the problem.

The orders significantly increase the chance that officers will engage in more indiscriminate enforcement tactics or face accusations of civil rights violations as they strain to meet quotas, according to current and former ICE officials.

[snip]

Neither ICE nor Homan responded to requests for comment. After an earlier version of this article was published, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an email that, “your story is false,” but did not reply when asked for specifics.

[snip]

But Paul Hunker, a former ICE chief counsel in Dallas, said arresting serious offenders takes time, staff and planning — more time than quotas might allow.

“Quotas will incentivize ICE officers to arrest the easiest people to arrest, rather than the people that are dangerous noncitizens,” said Hunker, who, as the agency’s chief counsel in Dallas, oversaw offices in North Texas and Oklahoma from 2003 through January 2024.

Fox, in its story lifting the WaPo story (with attribution but not a link), instead provided paragraph after paragraph providing excuses.

As CATO reported recently, this is what happened last time: Trump focused so much on asylum seekers, he left criminal aliens to roam free.

Candidate Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda will make the country less safe in two significant ways. First, it would remove a population that is less likely to commit crimes, ultimately making America’s neighborhoods less safe. For instance, Cato’s research has shown that both legal and illegal immigrants are nearly half as likely to commit crimes for which they are incarcerated in the United States. With unique data from Texas, we have found that immigrants—both legal and illegal—are less likely to commit homicides. Numerous studies have also found that immigration is linked to lower crime rates, homicide rates, and drug-related deaths.

The second problem with mass deportation is just as significant: it would shift focus away from the removal of immigrants who do commit crimes. Noncitizens who commit serious crimes should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and deported. Whatever amount the government spends on immigration enforcement, it should spend on detaining and removing this small minority of individuals. Donald Trump claims that he did that, but the facts tell a different story regarding his record on migrant criminals:

  • On his fourth day in office, Trump signed an executive order rescinding Obama-era policies that prioritized the detention and removal of serious public safety threats;
  • Within a few months, his administration was secretly separating families, using prosecutorial resources to jail migrant parents and focusing resources on visa overstays, not serious criminals;
  • During the height of family separation, Trump deprioritized prosecuting migrants with criminal histories to instead spend resources on separating families;
  • While Trump poured resources into detaining asylum seekers, he also released nearly 58,184 noncitizens with criminal records, including 8,620 violent criminals and 306 murderers;
  • ICE ended up (re)arresting nearly 11,000 noncitizens who entered under Trump and were convicted of non-immigration crimes, including rape and murder; and
  • Trump’s policies incentivized migrant criminals to enter, triggering a threefold increase in the number of convicted criminals attempting to cross the border illegally.

Miller predictably is already trying to spin the civil violation of illegal entry into a crime, to say nothing of paying Social Security that you’ll never get in return as a tax crime.

Which is what two experts told Axios would happen: Miller would have to falsely claim a larger pool of migrants are criminals because he falsely told stupid Trump voters there were more criminal aliens during the election.

What they’re saying: “There are not millions of people with criminal records to deport,” Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago, tells Axios.

  • Trump “keeps trying to bullsh-t with the public that there are all these particularly serious so-called criminals. There aren’t enough of those people to exist to be 1 million,” Karen Tumlin, director of the immigrant legal advocacy group Justice Action Center, tells Axios.
  • Both Hallett and Tumlin expect Trump to begin calling all undocumented immigrants “criminals” in order to say millions of criminals could be deported.

Remember, during the election Trump and Miller falsely claimed there were over 400,000 criminal aliens wandering around, when that stat primarily counts the number of people who are already safely housed in US prisons.

Former President Donald Trump is wildly distorting new statistics on immigration and crime to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump falsely claimed Friday and Saturday that the statistics are specifically about criminal offenders who entered the US during the Biden-Harris administration; in reality, the figures are about offenders who entered the US over multiple decades, including during the Trump administration. And Trump falsely claimed that the statistics are specifically about people who are now living freely in the US; the figures actually include people who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.

“Kamala should immediately cancel her News Conference because it was just revealed that 13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during her three and a half year period as Border Czar,” Trump wrote in one post on Friday, the day Harris visited the southern border in Arizona. Harris “allowed almost 14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country,” Trump wrote in another Friday post. They “roam free to KILL AGAIN,” he wrote, escalating his rhetoric, on Saturday.

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false in two big ways. First, the statistics he was referring to are not specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration. Rather, those statistics are about noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — where some have been listed for years, including while Trump was president, because their country of citizenship won’t let the US deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; they are on the list because they are not being held in immigration detention in particular.

The new statistics, released by ICE in a letter to a Republican congressman this week, said there were 425,431 total convicted criminals on the non-detained docket as of July 21, 2024, including 13,099 people with homicide convictions.

Trump lied to his rubes, with the able assistance of his chief racism advisor. And now he’s struggling to assure his supporters he’ll deliver the eye-popping numbers he promised.

Which is why I’m laughing so hard at Johnny Maga.

Because even if Trump meets these quotas — quotas which will end up focusing on the law-abiding migrants rather than the dangerous people Miller has been wailing about — he’ll only deport 547,500 people this year, nowhere close to the mass deportations he sold his rubes.

You all lied. You lied and lied and lied to make voters afraid.

And already on day 8, you’re spinning wildly rather than simply admitting you cynically lied to gin up fear to get Trump elected.

Update: Greg Sargent discussed this at length in his podcast today.

Trump’s Slop and Ouch First Week

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Trump’s failson practically wet himself with a Tweet bragging about what CIA Director John Ratcliffe accomplished on his first day at the office.

Given John Brennan’s 2023 testimony that stood by the opinion expressed in the letter, Jr’s claim he “lied” may well be legally actionable (and Brennan said then, as he did the other day, that the only reason he retained his clearance was for intelligence officials to be able to consult with him). Plus, many if not most of the people from whom Ratcliffe “strip[ped] security clearances” didn’t have them; the most impotent kind of signaling possible. But it worked for Trump’s failson!

Jr also makes a big deal of the fact that John Ratcliffe, without explaining the meaning of a “low confidence” assessment, released a report that his predecessor, William Burns, ordered up.

Jr was, like mediocre men are wont to do, grading Ratcliffe on a curve. And that was his idea of a big win.

Trump has overtly pitched a claim he’s engaged in Shock and Awe (and, given the widespread adoption of the term, seems to be pushing a similar campaign to the press). While the attention on Trump’s attack on rule of law and marginalized people is absolutely merited, in addition to wowing a captive press, Trump’s declaration of Shock and Awe has shifted the focus away from ways that Trump has affirmatively hurt Americans, including, undoubtedly, a great number of his own supporters, what I’m dubbing his Slop and Ouch campaign.

Trump halt on NIH funding literally shut down cancer treatment already in process (ironically, since Trump claimed he was attacking Joe Biden’s “cancer” when signing many of his Executive Orders). Cancer doesn’t doesn’t discriminate against MAGAts. Shutting down cancer trials may literally be taking away a Trump’s supporter’s latest hope of a cure.

Trump’s attacks on Biden’s efforts to lower drug prices may lead to higher costs for generic prices and could even lead to higher prices for diabetes drugs (setting aside any impact threatened tariffs on Denmark would have on Ozempic prices).

Trump reversed access to wind power, which has become cheaper than fossil fuels. This will force American consumers to pay more for dirtier fuel. Foreign competitors are already licking their lips about the competitive advantage it gives them.

Trump’s attack on programs focused on environmental justice will harm poor rural communities.

And after spending four years declaring one after another infrastructure week only to have Joe Biden deliver it right away, Trump is threatening the funding for bridge and road projects already underway. He’s taking away what he promised — but failed to deliver — during his first term.

His rescission of job offers throughout government (though Veterans groups were able to get a reversal on VA care) has left thousands stuck with their lives in limbo, with movers arriving but no job to move to on the other end.

Trump’s attack on public health even as Avian Flu threatens to snowball will exacerbate the already increasing price of eggs — which Trump himself made a key campaign plank.

And because he is choosing to pursue his deportation policy in the stupidest way possible, it is creating problems. HCI detained three people in a Newark raid with out a warrant, reportedly including a Puerto Rican and a veteran. And Mexico refused a landing request for a deportation flight on a military plane (it accepted four others that were on chartered flights, which cost less to run and may have greater capacity; also, Colombia has since blocked a military transport flight); military flights to Guatemala avoided Mexican airspace, suggesting Mexico refused overflight requests as well. Trump is also claiming repatriation flights are instead deportation flights in false claims that he’s delivering on his promise of mass deportation. And the single stay stats many are boasting about aren’t higher than some days during 2022. Despite his claims of Shock and Awe, Trump has had to lie to support his claims he succeeded in doing the one thing he has prioritized most.

And all that’s before the inflationary effect of deporting those who pick America’s food and build her homes.

None of this takes away from the grave damage Trump did in his first week, particularly to those like Trans people and migrants he is trying to treat as unpersons.

I don’t mean to minimize the ways this is going to get far worse. It will get far worse. It will devastate the lives of a lot of vulnerable people.

There’s nothing good about the fact that, in addition to all the people Trump has deliberately targeted for cruelty, Trump has also inflicted real damage on his own supporters. But it’s a sign of one direction where this could head, particularly as a dumbing down of government hires in favor of sycophants starts degrading efficacy.

An ideology that places grievance above all else — an ideology that is willing to hurt America if that’s what it takes to reverse the successes of the Biden Administration — is an ideology guaranteed to impose pain far beyond those targeted for spectacle and cruelty.

Underneath Trump’s Shock and Awe that is doing grave damage to the Constitution and Trump’s marginalized targets, there’s a Slop and Ouch that targets everyone this side of his billionaire friends. And that needs to remain visible, too.

“Embarrassingly Wrong:” The Ongoing Misinformation Campaign about the Hunter Biden Hard Drive

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Trump’s Executive Order stripping 51 former spooks of clearance for writing a true letter expressing their opinion that Rudy Giuliani’s claims to have Hunter Biden’s emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” has led to inevitable false claims about the hard drive people falsely call a laptop.

Shockingly, it comes from Shane Harris, who at least while at WaPo would not make the kinds of errors he makes in this piece.

Harris states as fact that the 51 spooks were “embarrassingly wrong” and as proof, asserts that “the emails really did turn out to belong to Hunter Biden.”

But they were wrong. Embarrassingly wrong. The emails really did turn out to belong to Hunter Biden, and they raised legitimate concerns that he was trying to profit from his father’s political position. No evidence ever surfaced that Russia had played a role in bringing the emails to light. Intelligence experts sometimes make bad calls. This was one of those times.

[snip]

Some of the signatories still defend their work by noting, correctly, that they said the emails might be part of some Russian trick, not that they definitely were. That too-cute defense does not absolve them of bad judgment.

Except, as John Brennan noted in an interview on MSNBC, one thing they posited in the letter is that the information might be “accurate information,” noting that Russia did just that in the 2016 presidential election.

Such an operation would be consistent with some of the key methods Russia has used in its now multi-year operation to interfere in our democracy – the hacking (via cyber operations) and the dumping of accurate information or the distribution of inaccurate or misinformation. Russia did both of these during the 2016 presidential election. [my emphasis]

Harris knows this stuff! While the Guccifer 2.0 persona altered some of the documents stolen from the DNC and misrepresented others and Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s trolls engaged in outright fabrication, the emails stolen from John Podesta were authentic. The operation nevertheless succeeded in sucking up all the attention in the last several weeks of the election, with scandals manufactured out of inconclusive emails, just like the ones used in the NYPost story.

So claiming that the spooks were wrong because the emails really did turn out to be Hunter’s simply misrepresents both the letter and the mechanism of information operations.

As for Harris’ claim that, “No evidence ever surfaced that Russia had played a role in bringing the emails to light”?

Even ignoring Lev Parnas’ testimony that Rudy was offered a laptop hacked with the assistance of Russian spies in 2019 (while unverified, that is evidence, and Mykola Zlochevsky got the legal relief from Trump’s DOJ that Parnas claimed Rudy was offering at the time), the available record shows that the FBI didn’t do the most basic work they would have had to do to check for such evidence.

Remember, the currently operative story is that someone claimed to be Hunter Biden dropped off three devices at John Paul Mac Isaac’s store in April 2019. JPMI kept one to made a copy of the data. But no one ever retrieved the laptop or a hard drive on which JPMI stored the data. So after snooping through it all, months later, JPMI’s father offered up the laptop to the FBI. In December 2019 — days after Rudy traveled to Kyiv to meet with Andrii Derkach and the same month when DOJ shut down an investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky — FBI obtained both the hard drive and a laptop using a subpoena referencing a money laundering investigation that is not referenced in the warrant from the known tax investigation.

But there’s little evidence that the FBI checked that story. Indeed, the public evidence suggests there’s something fishy about the hard drive, which was the basis for all the other copies, including the one Rudy got.

  • Mac Isaac’s own description of his actions does not match that of the FBI. On top of timeline discrepancies (including about whether FBI accessed the device before obtaining the known warrants), that includes misidentifying the devices dropped off at his shop and falsely claiming the laptop ultimately turned over to FBI did not have a removable hard drive (which was JPMI’s explanation for why he copied the laptop in the way he did).
  • A March 31, 2020 email documented concerns, “about quality and completeness of imaged/recovered information from the hard drive” that “for a variety of reasons [USAO] thought they needed to keep it from the agents” who might testify at trial.
  • Ten months after obtaining the laptop, the FBI had never checked the creation date of the files on it and the FBI never indexed the laptop (nor did it Bates-stamp the files they used at trial).
  • Hunter Biden’s laptop data was not introduced at trial via an expert witness. Rather, a summary witness introduced the data, and she clearly testified she had not been asked to check for signs of tampering. The only things she mentioned at trial that validated the laptop is that the laptop matched subpoena information for Hunter’s iCloud (which may mean no more than that it accessed the account) and Hunter’s publicly available iCloud email account had received an email from John Paul Mac Isaac. Those sworn claims were far short of the things investigators had earlier claimed tied Hunter to the laptop: an exchange of calls, a local purchase, and “other intelligence.”
  • The expert validation used in lieu of expert testimony does not identify the device(s) it validated and only refers to a single extraction report even though two separate extractions (one of the hard drive, another of the laptop) were done.
  • According to prosecutors, the Cellebrite report of the hard drive from which (according to JPMI) all subsequent copies were made is 62% larger, by page count, than the Cellebrite report of the laptop itself.

FBI’s thin validation of the laptop could not rule out involvement of others, not least because of Hunter’s otherwise erratic behavior in the period.

  • At least seven different laptops had accessed Hunter’s iCloud account in the years leading up to Mac Isaac obtaining it; Zoe Kestan testified that Hunter would do business from her laptop and she had access to his bank account via that laptop.
  • Kestan also testified that Hunter would give her and his drug dealers one time codes so they could access his bank accounts.
  • In January 2019, Hunter claimed that his Russian drug dealer had stolen a laptop (this may actually have been an iPad) from him in August 2018; this was the same period when new devices accessed Hunter’s Venmo account from two different cities within 12 minutes of each other. David Weiss appears to have made an error in the Tax Indictment about a closely related Venmo transaction.
  • The access to the laptop in FBI custody does not match Hunter’s normal pattern after obtaining a new device of logging into his iCloud account and at least one of his Google accounts in fairly quick succession.
  • The days before Hunter bought the laptop that would eventually end up in Fox News pundit Keith Ablow’s custody, he paid a Slavic sex worker over $8,000 via four different transactions and different bank accounts, an outlier both in amount and the multiple payment methods.
  • The laptop itself has an inexplicable collection of data, much of which is unavailable from the iCloud backups obtained with warrants in 2019.

Hunter Biden was an addict. As such he had almost no control over his own devices, and both Kestan’s testimony and his own memoir describe that he routinely lost devices. Particularly given the known access he provided others and the number of devices that accessed his iCloud account, it would be child’s play for nefarious actors to package up Hunter’s data on a laptop.

And, at least as late as David Weiss made that error in the tax indictment, no one at FBI or DOJ appears to have tried to check what happened to Hunter Biden’s devices (I think the Kestan testimony may have been based on interviews just before the June gun trial). By all appearances, DOJ had no plan to use evidence from the laptop had the tax case gone to trial.

In his testimony for Jim Jordan’s investigation regarding the letter, James Clapper repeatedly said he’d like a statement about the FBI’s forensic analysis of the laptop. At Kristin Wood’s interview by the Committee, Trump’s OMB Deputy designee (and then Congressman) Dan Bishop said, “If, in fact, the FBI has not conducted a forensic investigation, or has conducted a forensic investigation and has suppressed the results, should the American people continue to defer to the FBI?” Yet when I tried to liberate that forensic report last year, DOJ successfully fought its release.

I’m not saying that this was a Russian operation. I’m saying that, based on the public record, the FBI did scandalously little to even test whether it could be; there’s no evidence they took the steps they would have needed to rule it out and plenty of reason to believe they did not.

The FBI never even indexed the laptop, not over the course of four years of reliance on it. They’re in no position to make claims about its provenance.

And so, Shane Harris is in no position to lecture spooks about them being “embarrassingly wrong.”

Herod Goes to the National Cathedral and is Disappointed

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The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC

It was amusing to me to hear Trump’s reaction to the service at the National Cathedral on January 21st. I’ve been a pastor for a long time, and heard many opinions offered about the quality (or lack thereof) of the services I’ve designed and led and the sermons I’ve given. To me, Trump’s reaction says a lot more about him than it does about Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde.

To start things off, here’s the printed program [pdf] prepared for those who attended the service. (You can watch the video of the service on the Cathedral’s YouTube channel here.) Notice the title on the front cover: “A Service of Prayer for the Nation.” Notice what isn’t on the front cover? Two words: Donald Trump. The message is clear, right from the start – this isn’t a celebration of Trump, like the inaugural balls or the rally at the Capital One arena. This is a service for the nation.

Not for “the citizens of” the nation.
Not for “the taxpayers of” the nation.
Not for “the leaders of” the nation.
This was a service for the nation – the *whole* nation.

Trump can attend, but it’s not about him or for him. It’s a service for the nation.

It’s also a service of prayer, and as I browse through the program, I can’t help but see the *whole* nation raised up again and again and again.

The pre-service music is an eclectic mix. The carillon selections are largely American composers, pairing old composers with 20th and 21st century arrangers. Two of the compositions are by anonymous composers, whose names have been lost to history while their music has not. The four organ selections are by two Lutherans (Bach and Buxtehude) and two Jews (Fanny Mendelssohn and her younger brother Felix). Bach and the Mendelssohns were German, and Buxtehude’s roots are more complicated because of the changing borders of Denmark, Sweden, and northern Germany at the time he was born. The brass selections come from three great composers from three nations: John Rutter (England), Anton Dvorak (the Czech Republic), and Aaron Copland (one of the greatest American composers). The pre-service music concluded with five choral pieces, each of which has deep roots in American religious life. These selections set the tone: this is a service for all the nation, with a mix of instruments, a mix of composers, and music with a mix of ethnic and religious roots that befit the mixed and diverse roots of the nation.

The Entrance Rite began with words from Jesus in Mark 17: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” Note those last two words: all people. Not a few, not some, not many, but *all* people. After a blessing from the traditions of the First Americans, the indigenous people who were here long before the Mayflower and Jamestown; long before Cortez, Pizarro, Balboa, and Ponce de Leon; long before Columbus and long before the Norse; the opening hymn by Fred Kaan was sung by all who are present in this moment, beginning like this:

For the healing of the nations, God, we pray with one accord;
for a just and equal sharing of the things that earth affords;
to a life of love in action help us rise and pledge our word.

I can imagine that a beginning like this put Trump in a pickle. “It’s all woke crap” he must have been thinking. “When will we get to the acclamation of my win in the election? When will we get to their acknowledgment of my power, my success, my victory? When are we going to get to the praise of me?” Spoiler alert: Never, never, and never. Because this service was never going to be about Trump, and I’m sure that never even dawned on him as he arrived at the National Cathedral.

But back to the hymn.

Lead us forward into freedom; from despair your world release,
that, redeemed from war and hatred, all may come and go in peace.
Show us how through care and goodness fear will die and hope increase.

In the context of Trump’s campaign, and the even closer context of Trump’s post-election announcements of his plans for the first hours and days of his administration, these words are a respectful yet powerful rebuke. Kaan is quite clear: the vision of the God to whom this prayer is addressed is One who prizes justice, equality, love, freedom, peace, care of others, goodness, and finally hope. This God is likewise dedicated to the end of slavery, despair, war, hatred, and most of all, fear. That last list is Trump’s go-to list, and Kaan named and condemned it out loud, in no uncertain terms, in four part harmony.

But Kaan was not done.

All that kills abundant living, let it from the earth be banned;
pride of status, race, or schooling, dogmas that obscure your plan.
In our common quest for justice may we hallow life’s brief span.

I knew Fred Kaan, whose early life was shaped by his family’s work in the Dutch resistance to the Nazis during World War II. He knew, firsthand, the ugliness of life under leaders who prize race and status, who punish and kill those who are Not Like Us. That first word – All! – leaps out with power, this time aimed at each and every power that divides, diminishes, and kills the abundant life God intends for all people.  These are words of resistance, written by one who (along with his family) lived a life of resistance during WWII. These are words offering hope to those unwilling to sell their souls to MAGA and Trump, and sending a shiver through Trump and JD Vance if they were paying attention.

And Kaan is still not done, as he ties up this hymn with one last broadside against the MAGA Un-Gospel:

You, Creator God, have written your great name on humankind;
for our growing in your likeness bring the life of Christ to mind
that by our response and service earth its destiny may find.

Those who pray this prayer — who sing this song — are not praying to shut refugees seeking safety out of the country. They are not praying to round up those who lack the right paperwork to live here, put them in detention camps, and shove them elsewhere. They are not praying to celebrate the exceptionalness of one race or nation or person above the rest of humanity. They are not praying to sit back in comfortable wealth and luxury, leaving it to the poor and needy to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

In one short hymn, the entire inaugural address that Trump gave the day before was ripped apart, using the voices that come from the throats of everyone sitting around him. His entire campaign message was challenged and opposed, by every voice that rang to the vaulted ceiling and was broadcast out to the world. Kaan died in 2009, but this hymn sounds as if it could have been written last week. And Trump had to sit there and take it, with all the cameras rolling.

Worst of all for Trump, this was but the beginning of the service.

I’m not going to go through the rest of the service in this kind of detail – you can do that for yourself. There were prayers offered by folks from all kinds of religious traditions – Christians of various denominations, as well as Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh leaders. These prayers were filled with words like “all” and “every” to paint a picture of our common life together. In the “prayers for all who govern,” the first petition was not for President Trump, but for “all the peoples of the earth,” and moved more narrowly to “the people of our nation” meaning all the people. In the “prayers for those who serve,” the petitions were offered for those in the armed forces and the diplomatic corps, for all civil servants that “they serve with integrity and compassion, without prejudice or partiality to better their communities and the nation,” for all teachers and educators, for all first responders, and critically at the end, “all the people of our land.” In the “prayers for the peoples of this nation,” Methodist Bishop LaTrelle Easterling opened them like this: “O God, whom we cannot love unless we love our neighbor, let us pray for the most vulnerable in our community and lead us to be present with them in their suffering.” This was followed by petitions of specific and vivid mention of those who are most vulnerable.

All this is what led up to the sermon by the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde that garnered such attention in the media and such opprobrium from Trump. He tried to personalize it, demanding an apology from her, but far from her being some isolated voice standing up to him, or some he said/she said debate, Budde was speaking out of the deep religious traditions of a very diverse nation:

In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country.

We’re scared now. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals.

They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.

I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.

This now-famous plea directed specifically to President Trump, offered in a quiet and measured words, was not a one-off. In that plea, she summed up and made plain the implications of Kaan’s opening hymn, the words of the prayers offered throughout the whole service, and everything that took place in the 90 minutes before she took her place in the pulpit and began to speak. If Trump was waiting for the service to finally turn to him, this plea is when it happened — and it pissed him off.

What Budde did, in all humility and in all power, was to name Trump for what he is: one of us, with specific powers and abilities to directly shape life for all the people of the country, and indirectly for the world. Note, though, that what she pleaded for from Trump was of a piece with all the music and prayers, calling on every one of us to use our own far smaller powers and abilities to shape life for all the people in our orbit for the better, as small as our powers may be compared with the powers wielded by Trump.

That, perhaps, is what most put Trump out of joint. She was saying to him “Your title may be fancier, your staff may be grander, cameras may follow your every movement, and microphones strain to catch your every word, but in the end, you share the same task as the lowliest person who cleans hotel rooms, who labors to pick crops and build homes and process poultry while undocumented. You are One of Us, no more special and no less special, no matter how much you long for it to be otherwise.”

I’ve preached to congregations that have included mayors and city officials. I’ve preached to state legislators, state executive branch officials, and state supreme court justices. I’ve preached in services attended by a presidential candidate (Illinois Senator Paul Simon). One thing that has sustained me in those settings, and given me the strength to say what needs to be said, is the strong sense of being surrounded by the voices of the ancestors, preaching this same good news to them that I preach to the lowliest and most marginalized- that all that God has made is good, and all deserve support and care and love from each other.

Several years ago, on the eve of the first anniversary of January 6th, I compared Trump with King Herod who tried to use the wise men so he could kill the infant born to be the Messiah, and I used not simply the account from the Gospel of Matthew but also the retelling of the story by James Taylor in his song “Home By Another Way. Here, in part, is what I wrote that day:

But Taylor isn’t singing just to retell the story of what happened back then. He’s preaching, in his own way, drawing his listeners into the song and changing us here today:

Well it pleasures me to be here
And to sing this song tonight
They tell me that life is a miracle
And I figure that they’re right
But Herod’s always out there
He’s got our cards on file
It’s a lead pipe cinch
If we give an inch
That Herod likes to take a mile

It’s best to go home by another way
Home by another way
We got this far to a lucky star
But tomorrow is another day
We can make it another way
“Safe home!” as they used to say
Keep a weather eye to the chart up high
And go home another way

Yes, Herod *is* always out there, looking to game the system and rape the system and break the system if that’s what it takes to keep himself in power.

But there is also always another way, a way that leaves Herod and his successors powerless and impotent.

My description of Herod’s/Trump’s way came back to mind with a crash on the 20th, as word of all those initial executive orders came tumbling out. Saying Trump is “looking to game the system and rape the system and break the system if that’s what it takes” back then seems frighteningly prescient today.

But like the wise men of old, Bishop Budde knows another way, as do all those who planned this most powerful service, and as did Fred Kaan. In JT’s words, in the face of Trump’s blizzard of executive orders which are designed to take and take and take some more from the most vulnerable among us, Budde didn’t give an inch. Instead, she stood in the path of our American Herod along with a host of others, naming that other way home.

And here’s the really really good news, that would scare Trump even more if he were to think about it: you don’t have to be a bishop to name Herod for who he is, to call out his ways of fear and death, and to lift up our neighbors. That’s what the wise men did, in going home by another way. They protected a poor, vulnerable refugee-to-be from a vengeful tyrant who feared for his own power. And that’s what each of us can do, wherever we are: name Trump’s way as the path of division, destruction, and death, and point to another way.

Because JT was right: it’s best to go home by another way.