Index to posts in this series

My previous post was about an article titled What Are We Living Through by Jedidiah Britton-Purdy and David Pozen. The authors offer three scripts people use to answer the title question.

It seems odd that the authors, both law professors, don’t address the role of SCOTUS, but it’s probably because people don’t think about the role of SCOTUS in creating this disastrous presidency. But thinking about SCOTUS clarifies the situation. The Trump regime isn’t a sudden turn, as centrists and almost all Democratic politicians say. It is part of a long project, funded by an ever-changing group of filthy rich right-wing White people. One of their first overt steps was taking control of SCOTUS.

Gaining control of SCOTUS

Appointments to SCOTUS have had been virulently political at least since the nomination of Robert Bork was stymied by Democrats, based largely on “… his outspoken criticism of the Warren and Burger Courts and his role in the Saturday Night Massacre.“   The filthy rich loved Bork both for his right-wing politics and for his devotion to their interests.

The Federalist Society was formed in 1982 by students at Harvard, Yale and University of Chicago law schools “… with the aim of challenging liberal or left-wing ideology within elite American law schools and universities.” Bork and Antonin Scalia spoke at their first public event. The Wikipedia entry says this about early funding

… $5.5 million came from the John M. Olin Foundation. Other early donors included the Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation[ and the Koch family foundations. Donors to the Federalist Society have included Google, Chevron, Charles G. and David H. Koch; the family foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife; and the Mercer family.

Readers will recognize those right-wing operations run by inheritors of great wealth.

Leonard Leo founded the Cornell branch of the Federalist Society and moved on to employment there. Under his leadership, five of the current members of SCOTUS are members of the Federalist Society.

Hacking at democracy

Once right-wing ideologues took over SCOTUS, they began hacking away at laws intended to protect our democracy. They got rid of campaign finance laws, eviscerated anti-corruption laws, wrecked the Voting Rights Act, authorized gerrymandering, and gave the filthy rich nearly everything they wanted. In the process, they ignored or dismantled guardrails on their own power, rules like standing, justiciability, and minimal decisions; they took on the role of determining facts (a role supposedly played by trial courts) and ignored stare decisis, the fundamental basis of US Constitutional law. Trump v. US freed Trump from criminal liability for anything remotely related to the office of President.

These cases had a huge impact, not least of which was the election of Donald Trump to a second term

Weakening Congress

Gerrymandering and toothless campaign laws enabled the Republicans to control the House of Representatives. Structural features of our system, including equal representation of states in the Senate and the filibuster made it possible for the Republicans to prevent congressional action.

SCOTUS compounded this weakness by striking down legislation it didn’t like. For example, John Roberts has a long-standing hatred of the Voting Rights Act. In Shelby County v. Holder he struck down the provision requiring certain states with a long history of racial discrimination in voting to submit all changes to their voting laws for pre-clearance. This procedure enabled the Department of Justice to review those laws for racial discrimination before they were allowed to take effect.

Roberts justified his decision with a newly-invented fiction he called the dignity of the states. Congress.he said, hadn’t done enough to satisfy Roberts that pre-clearance acted reasonably by singling out states with a history of racist actiions, somehow explaining away the express grant of such power toCongress in the 15th Amendment. Effectively Roberts set himself up as the arbiter of whether Congress had done enough to justify a rule he didn’t like.

Strengthening Trump

In Trump v. Andeerson, SCOTUS held that only Congress can enforce the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, effectively neutering it. In Trump v. US the current majority held that the president cannot be held accountable for crimes he commits that the current majority says are within the core executive functions of the president. These two cases cleared the way for Trump to run again.

Because there were no enforceable limitations on campaign finance, Trump was able to raise hundreds of millions from the filthy rich and got a second term. He promptly began breaking laws. He destroyed entire agencies and weakened the rest of them, he set masked gunsels to snatch people off the street if they looked like not-white people (an action permitted as Kavanaugh Stops), refused to comply with Congressional appropriation laws, fired heads of independent agencies, fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and more. SCOTUS has at least temporarily allowed all these assaults on Congress’ express Constitutional power, explaining that Trump wants it and if he can’t have it that’s a terrible injury, worse than allowing ICE to kidnap people.

Political discourse

I think Purdy-Britton and Pozen are mostly right about the nature of political discourse, and that’s a problem. Their three scripts don’t include this partial list of horribles about the current SCOTUS majority. Concentrating only on the marauding president is simply not good enough to deal with our situation. The Supreme Court has also lost its legitimacy and done terrible damage to our democracy in the process.

I agree with an opinion piece in The Guardian written by Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, law profs at Harvard and Yale, titled It’s Time to Accept that the US Supreme Court is Illegitimate and Must be Replaced. This article summarizes a longer paper,  The Post-Legitimacy Court.. Both of these deserve more consideration than I give them here.

The paper cites Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania as a major source of the idea of legitimacy:

“The Court’s power lies in its legitimacy,” Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, and Souter explained in their joint opinion, “a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people’s acceptance of the Judiciary fit to determine what the Nation’s law means and to declare what it demands.”

The authors say that the current majority has abandoned the goal of preserving legitimacy, suggesting that they

… might care about the views only of other conservatives (whether lawyers or the public) [which] would be consistent with the larger turn in Republican politics.

The authors discuss responses by some of my favorite legal writers. law profs Kate Shaw from the Strict Scrutiny podcast, and Steve Vladek. The authors say, and I agree, that their reactions to this Court are too legalistic and restrained. Doerfler and Moyn say the current majority has moved the Court’s institutional legitimacy to the brink of cliff, and citizens need to push it over the edge.

I agree, and would go farther. The current majority is not a court. It’s a group of six political actors no different from the majority of a congressional committee. Each member has goals, and these mostly coincide with the goals of the Republican Party and its largest donors. They have the votes and that’s all that counts. The current majority has rejected national legitimacy in favor of the exercise of raw power.

I always blame Roberts personally for every evil thing Trump does. Here’s an example.

Hammer the Court whenever you get the chance, on social media and in real life. It’s the first step to change.

At the hearing in accused pipe bomber Brian Cole’s case the other day, Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh ordered both sides to file their views about whether the indictment DOJ obtained against Cole from a Superior Court grand jury was valid; he ordered those filings to be posted to the public docket by end of business yesterday.

MINUTE ORDER as to BRIAN J. COLE, JR.: As discussed during today’s proceedings, the Court was presented yesterday afternoon with a two-count indictment in this case that was returned by a D.C. Superior Court grand jury, rather than a federal court grand jury. The indictment included the same two counts charged in the criminal complaint, namely 18 U.S.C. 844(d) and 844(i). In asking the Court to accept the indictment, the government invoked D.C. Code § 11-1916(a), which provides that “[a] grand jury serving in the District of Columbia may take cognizance of all matters brought before it regardless of whether an indictment is returnable in the Federal or District of Columbia courts.” The Court recognizes that Chief Judge Boasberg recently upheld the propriety of this approach based on that statute, concluding that Section 11-1916(a) authorizes local D.C. grand juries to return indictments in U.S. District Court (and vice versa). United States v. Stewart, 2025 WL 3237833 (Nov. 20, 2025). But Judge Boasberg then stayed that ruling pending appeal, stating in part that “the public interest lies in letting the Court of Appeals decide this issue before the Government moves forward both on this case and in similar fashion on other cases.” See Stewart, No. 25-mj-225, Order (Dec. 9, 2025). The Court yesterday deferred a decision on whether to accept the indictment pending further briefing from the parties on the question of whether Judge Boasberg’s stay order extends to the circumstances here. The parties were directed to submit briefing on that question, and the Court intends to issue a decision in short order on whether to accept the indictment as proposed. Meanwhile, the Court ORDERS that both sides shall file their respective briefs on the public docket by close of business on December 31, 2025. Either side may request redactions to their briefs the extent they believe it necessary, provided that the filing is accompanied by an appropriate motion to seal. SO ORDERED. Signed by Magistrate Judge Matthew J. Sharbaugh on 12/30/2025. [my emphasis]

According to Cole’s response, the government may have filed something under seal (I’m confused about the date here, because Cole’s response bears yesterday’s date, which would make the government filing, filed “yesterday,” on December 30).

Defendant Brian Cole Jr. respectfully submits this response in opposition to the government’s memorandum, filed late yesterday, December 29, 2025, asking this “Court [to] accept the indictment return,” referencing a document returned earlier that day not by a grand jury of this Court but rather by a grand jury organized by, and sitting at the behest of, the D.C. Superior Court. (Gov. Mem. at 7.)

But Jeanine Pirro went out partying last night before actually filing whatever they filed publicly.

And given the panic that Cole’s response describes, it suggests there may be real problems with the case.

The response provides the back story to their December 28 filing seeking to clarify that Tuesday’s hearing would include a probable cause inquiry.

On Christmas Eve, Cole’s attorneys asked prosecutors whether the December 30 hearing or whether they would indict before then.

We also need to know whether the government plans on holding a probabl[e] cause hearing on Tuesday [December 30, 2025]. We have received no information regarding an indictment and thus would like to know the government’s position on this. Please let us know by December 27, 2025.

Cole’s exasperated filing translated that inquiry this way: “Are you going to indict this case before next Tuesday?” [italics original].

The government used the holiday to stall almost two days, after which they asserted that the hearing would deal only with detention.

Tuesday’s hearing is a detention hearing under 18 U.S.C. § 3142(f). The government will be proceeding by proffer.

As Cole’s filing describes, nothing about that response made sense.

In this context, two options seemed likely: (1) the government had tried and failed to secure an indictment; or (2) it was still planning to obtain an indictment from the federal grand jury on Monday. To that end, Mr. Williams quickly wrote back:

Also, please tell us whether the government has sought an indictment before a grand jury on the charges against Brian Cole Jr. If an indictment was sought before a grand jury, we are requesting all documents demonstrating the outcome of the grand jury. For example, if a “No Bill” was rendered by the grand jury on Brian Cole Jr’s charges, please provide us with that. Please provide us with this documentation prior to this Monday.

On December 28 (that is, the day Cole’s attorneys filed that motion to clarify), AUSA Charles Jones responded that no grand jury was sitting after December 19, which surely he knew in real time.

As John [Shoreman] indicated below, the parties have not yet scheduled a Rule 5.1 preliminary hearing given the defense’s request to continue the December 15 detention hearing (at which we would typically have scheduled the preliminary hearing). Please let me know if you have a view on when to schedule that hearing.

Had there been a “no bill” in this matter, we would have promptly reported it to the Court pursuant to FRCP 6(f).[2] The government has not yet sought a grand jury indictment in this case given the defense’s request to continue the detention hearing and your agreement to exclude time under the Speedy Trial Act’s 30-day indictment deadline. Additionally, there are no sitting grand juries in D.C. District Court between 12/19 and 1/5.

Which Cole’s attorneys used to note that the FBI was surveilling Cole for a good deal of time before they arrested him.

2 The government must only make the report of a “No True Bill” under Fed. R. Crim. P. 6(f) “[i]f a complaint or information is pending against the defendant,” so the government’s response does not say whether it sought (and failed to receive) such an indictment prior to Mr. Cole’s arrest. From discovery, the defense team is aware that federal agents had placed the defendant under surveillance for a long period of time before his arrest, suggesting again that they had plenty of time to seek an indictment.

Cole’s team wonders whether they tried and failed to indict Cole; I repeat my observation that they did this last minute, in such a way that they would be unable to prosecute others.

This is when the filing gets a bit comical.

They translate what this means, again.

In turn, defense counsel finally had the answer to the question they had asked four days earlier: No, the government is not going to indict this case before next Tuesday. This meant, based on a plain reading of the relevant federal Rules and statutes, that there would have to be a preliminary or Mr. Cole would be released without conditions. [italics original, again]

In real time, Cole’s lawyers offered to forgo the probable cause inquiry if prosecutors would release him on bail.

(1) “We can exchange dates for the preliminary hearing;” and (2) “[W]ould the government be interested in waiving the preliminary hearing in exchange for bail under a strict set of agreeable conditions placed on Mr. Cole?”

That’s when Jones got obstinate: No release, no probable cause hearing until January 7.

23. About 20 minutes later, the government responded on these two points by writing: (1) “Would the afternoon on January 7 or January 8 work for a preliminary hearing?”; and (2) “We’re not willing to agree to release under conditions in exchange

Cole’s lawyers were not that stupid, as they describe.

Given that a federal grand jury would reconvene on January 6, 2025, it would have been malpractice for defense counsel to agree to delay the preliminary hearing again until a date as late as January 7, 2026.

Jones went silent, so Cole’s lawyers flew out a witness who — they reportedly said during the hearing the other day — would have testified that the pipe bombs would not have exploded. They also noted what I did: neither the arrest affidavit nor the detention memo presented any evidence that Cole bought black powder or the potassium nitrate that he allegedly told them he used to make it.

If these weren’t bombs, they might not be able to charge Cole under the existing statute, and if they can’t, then the statute of limitations might run before a grand jury is seated to indict Cole with something else.

And in the government’s (apparently still sealed) filing, they try to blame Cole for adhering to Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

34. This is not hyperbole. The government admits as much, stating that it “would have sought [] an early indictment from a federal grand jury panel had there been any indication that the defense, contrary to all indications, intended to pursue a preliminary hearing on December 30, 2025.” In other words, the government expected defense counsel to drop the ball.3 That is not “changed circumstances.”

3 The government does not proffer any reason why competent defense counsel would agree to forego a preliminary hearing in the absence of receiving some benefit, such as an agreement to release the defendant from custody. That is because there is none—making the government’s purported reliance on this “indication[]” entirely unreasonable.

For what it’s worth, I think the government’s location data is also likely to be aggressively challenged.

But it sounds like the government also understands they’ve got a hole in their case where the actual explosives are supposed to be.

Jim Jordan tried to bury the Jack Smith deposition in a News Years Eve document (and video) dump.

Perhaps that’s because the funniest answer Smith gave (after already explaining why he had obtained subpoenas for the phone records of members of Congress, which was, in part, because Boris Ephsteyn and Rudy Giuliani were using two phones that day) was that Jim Jordan’s toll records were important because Jordan called the White House on January 6 because he was scared.

Q The toll record subpoena for the chairman of the committee.

A Well, I can tell you that, for example, there were — there was contact on, for example, January 6. But, again, another example for you is Mark Meadows, when he interviewed, when we interviewed him, he referenced the fact that that afternoon Chairman Jordan had been in contact with the White House. And, like Congressman McCarthy’s contact with the White House, it was relevant because, again, Meadows stated this, that these were supporters. These were credible people that the President relied on.

And what I recall was Meadows stating that “I’ve never seen Jim Jordan scared of anything,” and the fact that we were in this different situation now where people were scared really made it clear that what was going on at the Capitol could not be mistaken for anything other than what it was.

And it goes back to that sort of information from someone who is a credible source to the President, proving that that actually happened and that there’s actually a record of that call and exactly when it happened and what actions happened after that or didn’t happen after that, extremely probative to our case.

Meanwhile, after Republicans complained about Smith’s gag order on Trump,

Q Did you- — you sought gag orders in both the Florida case and the D.C. case.

Is that correct?

A We sought an order in the D.C. case under a rule — I think it’s 57.2 — and we did that because Donald Trump was making statements that were endangering witnesses, intimidating witnesses, endangering members of my staff, endangering court staff.

As you might remember, in the — right around when the indictment was released, he issued a tweet saying: “If you come after me, I’ll come after you.” He called — in a tweet he called General Mark Milley a traitor and mentioned that what he’d done in olden times people would be put to death. As a result of the things he was saying, the judge in this case was put — received vile death threats.

And with respect to D.C., both the district court and the court of appeals, a panel of judges, found that his actions were, in fact, causing what we said they caused. They were causing witnesses to be intimidated and endangering people.

And I believe it was the court of appeals also found that in addition to intimidating or chilling witnesses who existed, it would chill witnesses who had not yet come forward because they were afraid that they would be next.

So, yes, we did file that and I make no apologies for that.

Q Which witnesses do you think he would have intimidated? I mean, are there any specific witnesses that you could identify for the court?

A We did a filing. I don’t recall the specifics in that filing right now. But as I said, one of the issues from my perspective was not only the witnesses who he had specifically called out and caused threats to be issued, this phenomena that was found by both courts, it was the result of that is that a rational witness who maybe had not come forward would be completely afraid to because they would see that they would be next.

And I think the courts — both courts agreed with that.

Here’s how Smith answered Jasmine Crockett’s question about threats to Smith specifically.

Ms. Crockett. And, just to kind of finish up on this point, you, yourself — I’m not sure if this was discussed by the majority, but have you, yourself, been intimidated as a result of the actions that you took in this case.

The Witness. I’m not going to be intimidated.

Ms. Crockett. Have you been threatened.

The Witness. Yes.

Much later, Smith declined to get into the threats against him because they would endanger his (and he did not specify, but implied, his family’s) safety.

Q Do you feel like you have a target on your back?

A I believe that President Trump wants to seek retribution against me because of  my role as special counsel.

Q Would you be surprised if President Trump directs the DOJ to indict you?

A No.

Q Are you concerned about the safety of people who associate with you, like your former colleagues and your attorneys here today?

A I would prefer, if it’s all right, not to talk about my safety, because I think doing so could, in fact, endanger my safety and those of people around me.

Q Understood.

Though Smith did later confirm that Trump tried to retaliate against Covington & Burling because they represented him.

Regarding Smith’s investigation, one of the more interesting insights was his explanation of why he did not try to interview Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, or Roger Stone.

Ms. Lofgren. Can I ask — we attempted in the January 6th Committee to question Peter Navarro as well as Steve Bannon, and they were both prosecuted and spent time in jail. Roger Stone appeared but took the Fifth.

Were you able to provide — to get information from any of those three individuals and in the case of Mr. Stone provide use immunity so that he would have to testify?

The Witness. We did not.

Ms. Lofgren. Why not?

The Witness. We pursued the investigative routes that we thought were the most fruitful. We pursued those that we thought were necessary to get a complete understanding of the scope of the conspiracy. And given the highly uncooperative nature of the individuals you talked about, I didn’t think it would be fruitful to try to question them.

And the sort of information that they could provide us, in my view, wasn’t worth immunizing them for their possible conduct.

In addition to Ephsteyn, he also interviewed Rudy. Smith repeatedly said that prosecutors would have welcomed if Trump called any of his co-conspirators as witnesses.

Q Were you planning on calling John Eastman as a witness?

A I do not believe we would have, but we would have welcomed if the defense called him.

Q Okay. It gets tricky, though, for the defense to call him because the people like Eastman and Clark and, you know, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, I mean, you know, they were shrouded by the special counsel as, you know, co-conspirators one through six.

And so they all feared that they were going to be prosecuted if they said anything. Isn’t that fair?

A Well, they were co-conspirators. I can’t get into what was in their mind or not. can tell you some of the co-conspirators met with us in proffers and did interviews with us.

And so the idea that someone like Rudy Giuliani, who sat with a proffer with us, he was available as a witness, and we would have welcomed President Trump calling him as a witness.

Boris Epshteyn sat for an interview with us. We would have welcomed calling him as a witness.

Kenneth Chesebro. We would have welcomed it.

They probably had material lies all had made to either prosecutors or courts.

That comment led immediately to Republicans (who surely were trying to obtain evidence to support criminal charges against Smith) to ask why he hadn’t worked his way up through co-conspirators.

Q Why didn’t you charge any of those?

A I’m sorry?

Q Why didn’t you charge any of those, those co-conspirators?

A As we stated in the final report, we analyzed the evidence against different co-conspirators. We — my staff determined that we did have evidence to charge people at a certain point in time. I had not made final determinations about that at the time that President Trump won reelection, meaning that our office was going to be closed down.

Q Right. You’re a — you’ve had a 30-year career as a prosecutor. You prosecuted gang members, right?

A Yes.

Q You prosecuted organized crime members, right?

A Not as much.

Q But surely one of the fundamental principles of prosecutorial work is you work from the bottom up and you try to get as many fact witnesses to work with you. And a lot of times those fact witnesses have criminal liability.

And a lot of times those lower fact witnesses, the smaller fish, almost always they’re — they’re either prosecuted or they are given an immunity because they fear they’re going to be prosecuted. But here you didn’t — you know, you kept laser focused only on President Trump.

A Two points.

One, as I said, we were considering prosecutions of these people, and I think — I don’t want to say what the ultimate conclusion of that would have been, but that was something that was being considered.

The second thing I think to understand contextually is this was a case where the issue was how to present it in a concise way.

We had so many witnesses, again, so many witnesses who were allies of President Trump available to us to testify. This was not a case where we needed more witnesses, it was a case where we needed to be able to present the case in a streamlined way because there was so much evidence.

That led to Smith explaining why he focused on Trump: because none of the crime would have happened without him. It was all done for his benefit.

A All of that is false, and I’ll say a few things.

The first is the evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy. These crimes were committed for his benefit.

The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without  him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit.

So in terms of why we would pursue a case against him, I entirely disagree with any  characterization that our work was in any way meant to hamper him in the Presidential election.

Aside from the two phones revelation or a detail about texts between Bannon and Ephsteyn in which Bannon told Ephsteyn that Trump was “still on fire,” there were almost no new disclosures.

Indeed, staffers from both parties were painfully unaware of all the public filings that could have supported some questioning there, including about Kash Patel’s testimony.

Meanwhile, staffers of both parties wanted to know why Trump stole the classified documents, which Smith declined to answer this way when responding to Democrats,

Q Okay. Can you draw any conclusions about his motive for refusing to return these documents?

A Unless you can point me to a filing, a public filing on that issue, I don’t want to run any risk of running afoul of the injunction. And so without a public filing on that issue, I don’t think I can answer that.

Q Just one last question. Did you come across in the course of your investigation any evidence about why President Trump took those documents in the first place?

A Again, I don’t think that’s in the indictment here, and unless you have a public filing, that given the current state of the injunction, I don’t think that’s a question I can answer.

And he responded this way when Republicans tried to offer up a stupid excuse for Trump.

Q Uh-huh. Do you know if he was intending to save those materials for his 12 Presidential library?

A You mean the classified documents?

Q The items in the boxes, all of them.

A Well, if he — if his defense were that he was intending to take classified documents that he had no authority to take and he did it intentionally because he wanted to start a Presidential library and keep these documents in the locations that we talked about today, that’s a crime.

Q No, but my question was, all the items in the boxes, the shirts and the, you know, mementos, were they being saved for a Presidential library, to the extent you were able to develop that in the course of your investigation?

A You know, I mean, there were newspaper clippings in there, there were, I think, you know, different sorts of things that I wouldn’t — wouldn’t, to me, seem like the sort of things that would be in a Presidential library. I — to be honest, I’ve never been to a Presidential library, so — but if I were starting one, I don’t think that’s the sort of things I would put in it.

Q Okay. But you didn’t develop any evidence during the course of your investigation that the materials were intended to be saved for a Presidential library?

A I don’t recall that.

Notably, Smith was uncertain whether the report discloses whether they got all the stolen documents back.

Q Do you think that the FBI was able to retrieve all the classified documents that 20 President Trump improperly retained after he lost the 2020 election?

A I’m struggling because I can’t recall if that is in the final report. And because I’m not sure of whether it’s in there, I don’t think I should answer that question.

In any case, Aileen Cannon is officially withholding information that both Democrats and Republicans want to know; perhaps that can be used to force her to release the report.

It’s been quite a year, which is just the way Donald Trump, a narcissist the likes of which the world has never seen^tm, wants it.

Almost.

Can’t you just hear him: “I do, I do, and I do some more, more than anyone else ever, and yet I don’t get all the accolades I deserve. Haters.”

Now sure, he got the inaugural Gianni “Human rights problems? What human rights problems?” Infantino FIFA Peace Prize. But he wanted more, as he believes is only his due. Sadly, so many other awards have been somehow given to other clearly underdeserving folks, and still other awards are just begging to be given but no one has had the imagination or chutzpah to actually award them.

Until now. May I have the envelopes, please?

The Donald J. Trump Award for Narcissistic Rebranding goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. And how dare any mere jazz musicians object to this.

The Donald J. Trump Award for Nationalistic Rebranding goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for the Gulf of America. All the haters at the AP and elsewhere can just get a life.

The Donald J. Trump Award for Interior Decoration goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for the over-the-top golden decorations, the “live, laugh, love” style signage, and the stunning — really absolutely stunning — renovations of the Lincoln Bathroom at the White House. The Presidential Walk of Fame with its image of Biden the AutoPen and the jawdropping plaques recounting each president’s achievements is truly beyond belief.

The Donald J. Trump Award for Architectural Salvage goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his efforts to save the nation from the abomination that was the White House East Wing and replacing it with a much more appropriate Donald J. Trump White House Ballroom. Specific plans for the ballroom remain vague – I believe the phrase “we have a concept of a plan” fits this project, among others – but simply removing the East Wing was something that clearly needed to happen. And why does FLOTUS need any office space anyway?

The Donald J. Trump Award for Services to the Legal Community goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his amazing record of presidential appointments to remake the legal system. From his SCOTUS appointments at the top to his appointment of judges like Emil Bove in the middle and Aileen Cannon at the bottom, as well as his appointment of prosecutors like Jeanine Pirro and Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer, he has truly installed only the best people^tm and that would be enough to earn him this award. But Trump didn’t stop there. Add to this the way in which he pushed out career DOJ staffers and the manner in which he got Big Law to bend the knee in the private sector, and this award is a slam dunk.

The Donald J. Trump Award for Medical Advancements goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his efforts to dismantle and destroy the World Health Organization. Reading what Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health describes as WHO’s role in the world, it is obvious that WHO is a clear nuisance that needs to go:

The WHO plays many roles—the visible, apparent roles that many people are familiar with, and the roles that are less visible. This includes:

• Detecting, monitoring, and responding to emerging health threats, pandemics, and diseases of importance; we saw that during the COVID-19 crisis.
• Gathering and evaluating data and information from all over the world in order to understand the status of health globally and detect emerging problems. This includes acute crises as well as larger trends in health—which issues are causing a higher burden of disease and which ones we’re making progress on and should sustain efforts to address.
• Setting standards and developing guidelines that help people around the world, including here in the U.S., deal with various health threats and crises—not only infectious diseases, but all sorts of health issues.
• Providing commodities and goods to improve health around the world, including vaccines and drugs for many diseases. The U.S.’s withdrawal from WHO impacts not only the people who receive those goods, but also the supply chain for them, which includes many people in corporate America.
• Assisting with humanitarian response, which has important implications both for the populations who are affected by those crises and for global diplomacy and the role of our humanitarian responses in improving global diplomacy around the world.
• Providing very important technical assistance to governments and partners around the world to be able to respond to health challenges. The U.S. plays a very important role in providing this technical assistance.

Yeah. Who needs all that? (The “Bloomberg” in the name of the school was a clear giveaway as to JH’s unreliable wokeness.)

The Donald J. Trump Award for Services to the Environment goes to . . . Donald J. Trump’s decision to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. As climate scientist Kim Cobb told PBS,

“We’re talking about unique, one-of-a-kind facilities like supercomputers, ticked-out [sic, should be tricked-out] airplanes, and most importantly, a staff of over 800 people who are at the top of their game in innovating in weather and climate science for public good, putting out data that is on every single climate scientist’s computer around the country, if not around the world, and a nexus of collaboration as well that is important training grounds for the next generation of leaders.”

Yeah. Who needs all that when we’ve got The Weather Channel, amiright?

The Donald J. Trump Award for Service to Diplomacy goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his muscular engagement with Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Somolia, among other nations. (Simply renaming the US Institute of Peace as the Donald J. Trump US Institute of Peace seems hardly enough of a recognition for Trump’s breathtaking diplomatic work.)

The Donald J. Trump Award for Economic Excellence goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his truly amazing grasp of the power of tariffs. Just ask the Kentucky Bourbon industry, US soybean farmers, and the members of the chambers of commerce in cities and towns along the US/Canada border.

The Donald J. Trump Award for Civil Rights goes to . . . Donald J. Trump for his dismantling of anything that smacks of a lack of racial harmony throughout American history. The Stonewall Riots, the Civil War, and anything having to do with Native Americans are merely the tip of the iceberg on the list of things that need to be forgotten, for the good of the nation. Trump is Making America Great Again by going back to the basics. As the faculty senate of Haskell Indian Nations University put it, Trump’s cuts to Native American education “represents a continuation of the trail of broken treaties” that is all too familiar to Native Americans. (Rumor has it he is working on how to get the women back in the kitchen (barefoot and pregnant), the gays back in the closet, and the blacks back in the fields, but those are clearly just rumors. I think. I hope.)

And that’s just a start.

I’m sure there are awards I am missing, but I trust that the imaginative and creative Emptywheel commentators can add to the list. Because really, Alfred Nobel has six prizes with his name on them, and what did he do, really, except invent dynamite? Trump surely deserves many more awards with his name on them than Nobel’s six. or the few that I have listed here.

Trump is truly in a league of his own.

Happy New Year’s, everyone. May next year be better (OK, that’s a low bar, but I’ll take it.).

Adam Entous has a curious 15,000-word story about, “the Unraveling U.S.-Ukraine Partnership.”

As he describes, the story is based on, “more than 300 interviews with national security officials, military and intelligence officers and diplomats in Washington, Kyiv and across Europe.” Unsurprisingly, then, it has new details of Trump’s failed attempt to capitulate to Russia in a way that the President might claim was victory, such as an anecdote of how Trump came to treat Volodymyr Zelenskyy differently after Ukraine’s president chatted up a former beauty pageant wife of a Trump friend.

But this would not be a replay of the Oval Office blowup of nearly six months before.

Mr. Trump would remark to aides that when he owned the Miss Universe pageant, the Ukrainian contestants were often the most beautiful. Now, he blurted out, “Ukrainian women are beautiful.”

“I know, I married one,” Mr. Zelensky responded.

Mr. Trump explained that an old friend, the Las Vegas mogul Phil Ruffin, had married a former Miss Ukraine, Oleksandra Nikolayenko; the president had met her through the Miss Universe pageant. Now, he called Mr. Ruffin, who put his wife on the phone. Mr. Trump did the same for Mr. Zelensky, and for the next 10 to 15 minutes, the room went on pause as the two spoke in Ukrainian.

Ms. Nikolayenko talked about her family, still in Odesa. “He was surprised they didn’t leave,” she recalled of Mr. Zelensky. “My father wouldn’t leave. He’s an old-school officer. And he believes that if he leaves, there will be nothing to come back to. He wants to be with his home, with his land, with his country.”

“You could feel the room change,” said an official who was there. “The temperature dropped. Everyone laughed. What it did was create a human connection. It was kind of a mind meld. It humanized Zelensky with Trump.”

A month later, in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, Mr. Trump called Mr. Zelensky “a great man” who was “putting up a hell of a fight.” Later, on Truth Social, he wrote that after coming to understand “the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation,” he believed that “Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”

Even most of the president’s top advisers were startled by what seemed like an abrupt about-face. But according to one adviser, he was trying to shock the Russians.

There are new details of how CIA sustained its ties to Ukraine even as Whiskey Pete Hegseth betrayed them.

But there are at least two enormous gaps which would be central to explaining why Trump is betraying the Western order to ally with Russia.

First, there’s no discussion of Trump’s venality, and barely any discussion of the goodies Russia has offered to get Trump to betray Ukraine.

Worse, Entous minimizes Russia’s serial electoral assistance to Trump. Entous briefly describes the Russian investigation — not contesting Trump’s use of the term “hoax” — when explaining why (Entous claimed) Trump’s aides were reluctant to begin negotiations with Russia during the transition without sanction from Joe Biden.

Mr. Trump’s aides knew he was eager to get started, but they were also aware of the shadow that outreach to Russia had cast over his first term. Then, several aides’ undisclosed contacts with the Russians before the inauguration had become part of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump took to bitterly calling it “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.”

This time, his aides decided, they needed official cover.

“Look, we’ve been getting all kinds of outreach,” Mr. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told his Biden administration counterpart, Jake Sullivan. “We’d like to go ahead and start testing some of these, because Trump wants to move quickly.”

And so Mr. Waltz made a request, never before reported, for a letter of permission from Mr. Biden. [my emphasis]

And he once again doesn’t probe Trump’s narrative when describing how Trump blamed Ukraine for Russia’s 2016 interference.

There would be much tortured back story to contend with. During his first term, Mr. Trump had come to blame Ukraine, not the Kremlin, for the 2016 election interference that spawned the Russia investigation. And it was his effort to have Ukraine investigate the Bidens that led to his first impeachment. In meetings, according to five aides, Mr. Trump would sometimes say of Mr. Zelensky, “He’s a motherfucker.”

If you want to explain why Trump continues to claim to believe Russia’s lies, you would need to unpack why he would have either the political or psychological incentive to tell such lies about 2016.

You might also want to explain that, in addition to their 2016 election interference on Trump’s behalf, Russia also provided Trump electoral help in 2020 (in the form of Andrei Derkach’s outreach to Rudy Giuliani) and 2024 (which included at least more Derkach interference and a propaganda campaign targeted Tim Walz).

Why is Trump switching sides? Well maybe we should consider that we still don’t know how much help Russia gave him last year? Maybe we should consider why Nikolay Patrushev insisted that Trump “will be obliged to fulfill” the obligations Trump incurred to “certain forces” that helped him win? Why is Trump switching sides? I can’t imagine.

With that in mind, consider how Entous introduces Kirill Dmitriev, the central player in massaging Trump (and Steve Witkoff’s) venality to get them to flip sides.

Dmitriev is first introduced 14¶¶ after the paragraph describing how, “several aides’ undisclosed contacts with the Russians before the inauguration had become part of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.” Kirill Dmitriev’s origin story in this 15,000-word story dates to the time, in 2021, when Amos Hochstein tried to stave off Russia’s invasion.

In secret, a close Biden adviser, Amos Hochstein, had also tried to forestall invasion through talks with the chief of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev.

Is this some secret explanation for Trump’s nonsense claim that, had he been President in 2022, Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine? Did Hochstein exhibit insufficient venality for Putin’s needs?

Whatever the case, when Entous returns to Dmitriev another 15¶¶ later — the chronology so far is: Mike Waltz tries to get Joe Biden’s blessing to negotiate during the transition, which is the context for the Hochstein mention, but fails, and meanwhile even though Trump’s aides said they wouldn’t negotiate during the transition because of what happened in 2016, lo-and-behold, Steve Witkoff is!!! — the only specific history he invokes is that brief “flirt[ation] with Hochstein, before describing that Dmitriev flirts with everyone, though without providing details.

Mr. Dmitriev hadn’t only flirted briefly with the Biden administration. He’d had repeated flirtations with Trumpworld and come to know the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

A month into his job as Middle East envoy, Mr. Witkoff traveled to Riyadh to meet with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, about the war in Gaza. The crown prince was aware of Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to quickly negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, and he proffered an introduction.

“You’re going to have a lot of people come to you claiming to have a line into President Putin,” the crown prince told Mr. Witkoff. And Mr. Dmitriev, he added, was “the right guy. We’ve done business with him.” Mr. Kushner vouched for him, too.

Maybe this is the work of deceitful editors, but the silences in this narrative are stunning.

Dmitriev “hadn’t only flirted briefly with the Biden administration; he’d had repeated flirtations with Trumpworld.” The substance of those flirtations is absolutely central to this story. He had flirted, first, with Jared’s hedgie buddy Rick Gerson, who knew enough that it would be awkward to carry out such discussions during the transition.

When Dmitriev and Gerson met, they principally discussed potential joint ventures between Gerson’s hedge fund and RDIF.1101 Dmitriev was interested in improved economic cooperation between the United States and Russia and asked Gerson who he should meet with in the incoming Administration who would be helpful towards this goal.1102 Gerson replied that he would try to figure out the best way to arrange appropriate introductions, but noted that confidentiality would be required because of the sensitivity of holding such meetings before the new Administration took power, and before Cabinet nominees had been confirmed by the Senate.1103 Gerson said he would ask Kushner and Michael Flynn who the “key person or people” were on the topics of reconciliation with Russia, joint security concerns, and economic matters.1104

Then, via child molester George Nader, Dmitriev met with Eric Prince in the Seychelles, about which meeting both Prince and Steve Bannon mysteriously lost their communications.

Working both channels, Dmitriev pitched a plan not dissimilar from the one he’s pursuing now. Via Gerson, he pitched it to Kushner.

Dmitriev told Gerson that he had been tasked by Putin to develop and execute a reconciliation plan between the United States and Russia. He noted in a text message to Gerson that if Russia was “approached with respect and willingness to understand our position, we can have Major Breakthroughs quickly.”1105 Gerson and Dmitriev exchanged ideas in December 2016 about what such a reconciliation plan would include.1106 Gerson told the Office that the Transition Team had not asked him to engage in these discussions with Dmitriev, and that he did so on his own initiative and as a private citizen.1107

On January 9, 2017, the same day he asked Nader whether meeting Prince would be worthwhile, Dmitriev sent his biography to Gerson and asked him if he could “share it with Jared (or somebody else very senior in the team) – so that they know that we are focused from our side on improving the relationship and my boss asked me to play a key role in that.”1108

[snip]

On January 16, 2017, Dmitriev consolidated the ideas for U.S.-Russia reconciliation that he and Gerson had been discussing into a two-page document that listed five main points: (1) jointly fighting terrorism; (2) jointly engaging in anti-weapons of mass destruction efforts; (3) developing “win-win” economic and investment initiatives; (4) maintaining an honest, open, and continual dialogue regarding issues of disagreement; and (5) ensuring proper communication and trust by “key people” from each country.1111 On January 18, 2017, Gerson gave a copy of the document to Kushner.1112 Kushner had not heard of Dmitriev at that time.1113 Gerson explained that Dmitriev was the head of RDIF, and Gerson may have alluded to Dmitriev’s being well connected.1114 Kushner placed the document in a file and said he would get it to the right people.1115 Kushner ultimately gave one copy of the document to Bannon and another to Rex Tillerson; according to Kushner, neither of them followed up with Kushner about it.1116

Entous started his chronology with the lingering sensitivities about, “several aides’ undisclosed contacts with the Russians before the inauguration [which] become part of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election,” but never mentioned that Dmitriev is one of the key Russians in question (the only other main one being Sergey Kislyak). He never mentioned that back in 2017, Dmitriev was affirmatively asking to work via Kushner.

And then when he finally got to Witkoff’s first meetings with Dmitriev, during the transition in spite of every one else’s concerns about a repeat of 2016, … Kushner is already there, vouching for the guy who attempted to broker a very same kind of deal in 2017.

Dmitriev had “come to know the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner,” Entous reveals, but doesn’t say how. He describes Mohammed bin Salman (whose welcome by the Trump camp was brokered by Tom Barrack, who is also one of the two guys who got Trump to “hire” Paul Manafort to work for free) offering up Dmitriev’s name to carry out a job that Witkoff does not yet have, brokering peace in Ukraine, because, “We’ve done business with him.”

Entous doesn’t describe who MbS means by “we” in this context.

He simply follows that immediately by describing that MbS’ agent Jared Kushner, “vouched for him, too.” (Read Judd Legum’s piece on how Jared’s lucrative ties to MbS make his involvement in these negotiations illegal.)

And the real story no doubt starts there, with Jared’s seeming ongoing interactions with the guy who first tried to cultivate him eight years ago.

By all means, read the story.

But as you do, keep an eye on the degree to which Entous’ silences really obscure the meat of the story.

Robert Draper did a 1,000-word piece describing the Four Takeaways of his much longer magazine profile describing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump. It focuses on four steps in the process, which he presents out of chronological order:

• “Trump’s speech at Charlie Kirk’s memorial was a clarifying moment,” because it contrasted Erika Kirk’s forgiveness with Trump’s lack of Christian faith
• “Greene’s demands to release the Epstein files seemed to be the last straw for Trump,” because MTG’s threat to reveal the names of those who abused Epstein’s victims would hurt Trump’s friends
• “Her disillusionment with Trump goes beyond the Epstein files,” in which Draper lumps tariffs and Gaza but focuses primarily on the way Trump’s stochastic terrorism led to threats against MTG’s son
• “Greene said she was wrong for accusing Democrats of treason in the past,” which simply doubles down on the apology MTG made already on CNN and explained that MTG realized Christians don’t do such things

I don’t doubt that Draper thinks of the transformation he describes as dominated — bullets one and four — by MTG living by her faith, but the word “Christian” only appears in the 8,100-word profile six times.

And word frequency is just one tell that Draper may be indulging MTG’s own retroactive reconstruction of it.

The profile is based on interviews that took place earlier this month, though as Draper recounts, he has been covering MTG closely since 2021 and met with her repeatedly before this month. The Kirk memorial with which Draper began both his profile and his Four Takeaways occurred on September 21. He describes MTG’s perception of the difference between Erika’s forgiveness and Trump’s doubling down as the moment when, “the stress fracture that had been steadily widening between Greene and her political godfather became an irrevocable break.”

But his stress fracture comment introduces a paragraph listing five policy splits with Trump, most of which predate the Kirk memorial, the most important of which — her support for releasing all the Epstein files — predates the memorial by several weeks and gets its own paragraph here and a more focused treatment later.

• Declaring the war in Gaza a “genocide”
• Objecting to cryptocurrency and artificial-intelligence policies that, from her perspective, prioritized billionaire donors over working-class Americans
• Criticizing the Trump administration for:
  • Approving foreign student visas
  • Enacting tariffs that hurt businesses in her district
  • Allowing Obamacare subsidies to expire
• Argu[ing] that all investigative material pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein should be released

Much later, the profile describes that well before the Epstein break came the realization that Trump does not return loyalty (including a campaign disloyalty similar to the one that drove Elise Stefanik’s later break), followed by Trump’s targeted harassment when MTG opposed his cryptocurrency graft.

She considered running against Senator Jon Ossoff but announced in May that she had decided not to.

Greene’s stated reasoning at the time was that “the Senate is where good ideas go to die.” But the week after her announcement, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had shared with her a survey from his pollster, Tony Fabrizio, projecting that Ossoff would beat her by 18 points. Later, Trump would claim in a Truth Social post that their split “seemed to all begin” when he sent her the poll — suggesting, in effect, that Greene was pouting over his lack of support: “All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” Greene insisted to me, “It wasn’t about a Fabrizio poll.” She added: “I never had a single conversation with the president about it. Instead, he told me all the time, ‘You should run for governor — you’d win.’”

Still, Greene told me, it began to dawn on her that when it came to the president, loyalty is “a one-way street — and it ends like that whenever it suits him.” Being disabused of the idea that subservience would be rewarded appeared to have a liberating effect on her.

In June, Greene did an about-face on the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill after conceding that she voted for it without realizing that it contained a provision that would prevent states from enforcing restrictions on artificial intelligence for a period of 10 years. If the Senate did not strike the moratorium from the bill, Greene publicly warned, “when the O.B.B.B. comes back to the House for approval after Senate changes, I will not vote for it with this in it.” On July 1, the Senate voted to sever the provision from the bill, which Trump signed into law three days later.

Greene broke again from Trump on July 17, arguing on X that his cryptocurrency bill could permit a future president to “TURN OFF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT AND STOP YOUR ABILITY TO BUY AND SELL!!!!!” This time, Trump made his displeasure known to her — and to her peers.

That same day, Greene and roughly a dozen other House Republicans who also had reservations about the bill were summoned to the Oval Office. In Greene’s recollection, Trump focused his wrath on her. “When you have a group of kids,” she said, “you pick the one that is the most well behaved, that always does everything right, and you beat the living shit out of them. Because then the rest of them are like: ‘Oh, man, holy shit. If Dad does that to her, what would he do to me?’” A White House spokeswoman disputes that the meeting was contentious. “Not surprising to me at all,” Greene replied when I informed her of this. “They have major problems, and it’s only starting to build.”

That all preceded the date when MTG signed the Epstein discharge petition, which Tom Massie initiated in July, the day before Trump told her that his friends would get hurt if she exposed their names.

After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”

When she urged Trump to invite some of Epstein’s female victims to the Oval Office, she says, he angrily informed her that they had done nothing to merit the honor. It would be the last conversation Greene and Trump would ever have.

Along the way, Draper inserts something between the Epstein break and the Kirk epiphany and the ultimate break: the 8-week recess, during which MTG stewed as she heard complaints about affordability from her constituents.

But there was one more important ingredient.

As noted, Draper describes the evolving relationship he had with MTG. He first flew down to Rome, GA, in 2022, and honored MTG’s confidences, which built trust. She blew off a meeting for drinks during last year’s convention because Trump was giving her pride of place at the Convention, but shortly thereafter met with a NYT team and scoffed at their claim Trump would pursue retribution. Draper persisted with someone who adhered to the axiom that real news was fake for years.

There are a lot of lefties who hate this profile: They feel it goes easy on her (and given the Christian reconstruction, I’d agree). They see it as a willingness to let MTG rebrand herself, even while it foregrounds her transphobia. They hate the glam photo of her, which nevertheless provides helpful context to MTG’s claim she always opposed the plastic femininity of Mar-a-Lago (and provides a useful contrast with the still fresh Karoline Leavitt portrait).

In particular, she told me recently: “I never liked the MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization. I believe how women in leadership present themselves sends a message to younger women.” She continued: “I have two daughters, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts. I’ve never spoken about it publicly, but I’ve been planning to.”

I would add that Draper still treats Trump as the actor — Trump banished MTG, rather than she stood her ground in face of his demands.

It has been tempting for some observers to predict that the meteoric crash and burn of the MAGA movement’s loudest champion signals the beginning of the end for its leader as well. But it is Greene who is exiting the stage, while Trump continues to dominate it, as he did through impeachments and indictments and other controversies that no other politician would have survived.

Still, Draper hedges his bets. Maybe she will be a harbinger.

But because it represents an evolution for Greene, she may yet again prove to be a harbinger of a sea change in the movement she once helped lead.

By far the most fascinating part of the profile to me is how Draper traces MTG’s cognitive dissonance. In 2022 — and still today — MTG is certain there’s no way Joe Biden could have won the election in 2020.

One autumn evening in 2022, I ventured to ask just how she thought the 2020 election was stolen. Did she really think that a grand conspiracy, perhaps masterminded by the Obamas and the C.I.A., had secretly rigged the results?

“Robert,” she replied with a searching look, “do you really think Joe Biden got 81 million votes without even campaigning?”

“Yes,” I said. “They counted all the votes. That was the final tally. Why wouldn’t I believe it?” The look she then gave me, which I will never forget, was one of bottomless pity.

But the contrast between the earnest stories of the survivors followed by hearing Trump complain that naming those who abused Epstein’s girls would hurt his friends broke through a belief created by the bubble of Fox News.

The reason for her lack of concern, as Greene explained it to me, might seem improbable to anyone who is unfamiliar with how the mainstream press and the right-wing media cover the same story differently — or not at all. “The story to me,” she said, “was that I’d seen pictures of Epstein with all these people. And Trump is just one of several. And then, for me, I’d seen that Bill Clinton is on the flight logs for his plane like 20-something times. So, for people like me, it wasn’t suspicious. And then we’d heard the general stories of how Epstein used to be a member of Mar-a-Lago, but Trump kicked him out. Why would I think he’s done anything wrong, right?”

For Greene, the decades that Epstein spent eluding justice for exploiting and sexually assaulting countless girls and young women while amassing a fortune, and the seeming efforts by the government to cover up the injustice, “represents everything wrong with Washington,” she told me. This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.

One of the most important parts of MTG’s split from Trump has been an evolving relationship with the media, especially Fox News, and therefore, the truth, but with Draper always there persisting. That is, MTG had to work through the cognitive dissonance of learning that Trump really did have ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking, that he really was trying to cover it up, before she got to the point of retconning it all inside a faith narrative. Her own banishment from Fox News may have helped work through the cognitive dissonance.

I talk a lot about one of the ways you fight fascism is to peel off members of Congress, four in the Senate or eight in the House. I’ve laid out repeatedly how central the Epstein scandal was to that process.

Whether you like the Draper profile or not, whether or not MTG’s split from Trump will be a harbinger of more (like Stefanik’s) to come, what this profile does do is show what it took for one diehard MAGAt to go through it: political betrayal, real policy differences, retaliation, and then cognitive dissonance regarding Epstein, the Kirk epiphany, until finally responding to his terrorism in a dramatically different way than almost every other Republican, whether MAGAt or not.

There’s a process.

When DOJ released its detention memo for accused January 6 pipe bomber Brian Cole, the MAGAts showed almost no interest; they’re too busy claiming to have discovered benefits fraud in Minnesota first charged under Merrick Garland’s DOJ.

But Jeanine Pirro did. She want on social media and repeated the apparent miscitation of Cole’s own words I laid out here, treating a comment made in the present tense this month — “I really don’t like either party at this point” — as if it were a comment about his mindset on January 5, 2021.

Unsurprisingly, Cole’s attorneys took note, arguing in their bid for bail that the “government-induced excitement” around Cole’s arrest should not factor into bail consideration and in fact is a violation of local rules about prejudicing a case.

The government-induced excitement around the arrest of Mr. Cole should not take this Court’s focus away from two essential principles of law that govern bail hearings.1

1 Indeed the U.S. Attorney has made numerous comments in contravention of Local Criminal Rule 57.7(b), specifically concerning the “existence or contents of any confession, admission, or statement given by the accused” ((b)(3)(ii)) and “opinion[s] as to the accused’s guilt or innocence or as to the merits of the case or the evidence in the case” ((b)(3)(vi)). See https://abcnews.go.com/US/pipe-bomb-suspect-disappointed -2020-election-results-us/story?id=128157568 (U.S. Attorney Pirro telling the media that based on the evidence, it is “unmistakable” that Mr. Cole is guilty and that “[t]his guy was an equal opportunity bomber.”); see also https://www.facebook.com/judgeje aninepirro/posts/my-office-has-filed-court-documents-that-brian-cole-jr-accusedofplacing-pipe-b/1424070829083142/ (U.S. Attorney Pirro posting on Facebook that Mr. Cole “has admitted that he was responsible for the devices and gave a detailed confession to the charged offenses”).

The rest of their opposition memo provides mere hints of how or whether they might defend this case.

It describes the evidence against Cole as circumstantial evidence of past guilt, not proof of ongoing risk at issue in the present.

The government’s showing is entirely retrospective and circumstantial. Even if credited, the government’s evidence describes an isolated window on a single evening nearly four years ago. It does not point to a “pattern of troubling activity” that would typically warrant detention in other cases. Klein, 539 F. Supp. 3d at 155. No device detonated, and the government has not alleged any comparable conduct or dangerous affiliations in the years since. This circumstantial proof—absent a direct forensic tie or evidence of ongoing threats—cannot overcome the Bail Reform Act’s default in favor of release subject to appropriate conditions. See Munchel, 991 F.3d at 1283 (The “threat [to the community] must also be considered in context.”).

It describes the pipe bombs as having “weapon characteristics,” perhaps questioning whether they really were functioning bombs at all.

According to the affidavit, both devices were rendered safe by the U.S. Capitol Police and later assessed by the FBI Laboratory to have “weapon characteristics,” with components consistent with improvised explosive devices.

It cites relevant DC Circuit opinions on pretrial release that just happen to be January 6 cases, here, Federico Klein — the former Trump State Department official with ties to Argentina’s fascist governments who was released on pretrial bail but ultimately sentenced to 70 months in prison — and Eric Munchel (AKA the Zip Tie Guy), whose pretrial release set the standard for many other January 6 defendants, but who was ultimately sentenced to 57 months in prison. Elsewhere the filing cites Bruno Cua, who was sentenced to just a year in prison after his pretrial release, largely because he was so young and impressionable during the events at hand.

All three, of course, have since been pardoned.

But Cole’s attorneys don’t mention those back stories to the detention precedents which must be applied to Cole too. Nor do they explain what they mean when they say the specific conditions that led young Bruno Cua to stalk the halls of the Capitol created a “specific risk profile for Mr. Cole,” just like it did Cua.

Finally, the unique conditions surrounding January 5–6, 2021, are unlikely to recur in a way that would present the same risk profile for Mr. Cole.

But that comment suggests they’re skeptical — perhaps have already seen reason to be skeptical — that Cole was telling the truth when he asserted there was no tie between his alleged planting of the pipe bombs and January 6, as the government’s detention memo asserts but does not quote directly.

They have reason to do that, of course. If planting the pipe bombs was part of January 6, then Cole may already have been pardoned, just like Klein and Munchel and Cua.

They do, however, confirm that Cole has been diagnosed with being on the spectrum.

Mr. Cole is an African American adult who has been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Level 1 and with obsessive compulsive disorder;

And like most bail memos, they include letters from character witnesses.

The only sign that today’s combined detention hearing and preliminary hearing, scheduled for 1PM before a Magistrate Judge who presided over only a (relative) handful of January 6 cases, might harbor some surprises is a repeat of their more explicit demand in a different filing that DOJ prove probable cause.

The defense understands that the detention hearing will begin with preliminary discussions that concern whether a rebuttable presumption that Mr. Cole should be detained arises in this case. The defense’s position is that the government cannot continue to keep Mr. Cole in custody absent a valid finding of probable cause.

One reason to do that is it raises the bar on pretrial detention.

True, the Bail Reform Act creates a rebuttable presumption “that no condition or combination of conditions will reasonably assure . . . the safety of the community if . . . there is probable cause to believe that the person committed” one of an enumerated list of crimes. 18 U.S.C. § 3142(e)(2). But for purposes of making that determination, “[a] grand jury indictment, by itself” is what establishes the probable cause “to believe that a defendant committed the crime with which he is charged.” Taylor, 289 F. Supp. 3d at 62 (quoting Stone, 608 F.3d at 945); see also United States v. Smith, 79 F.3d 1208, 1210 (D.C. Cir. 1996) (“[T]he indictment alone would have been enough to raise the rebuttable presumption that no condition would reasonably assure the safety of the community.”)

But who knows. There might be more.

DOJ has submitted its detention memo for accused January 6 pipe bomber Brian Cole.

It largely tracks his arrest affidavit, only includes nifty maps and tables to show how his cell phone movement and his purchases showed his actions in preparation for and laying the pipe bombs.

It also includes details of his Mirandized, videotaped confession.

The description of his motive confirms he was a Trump supporter, but then explains he just planted the pipe bombs at both the DNC and RNC because he hated both parties — it had nothing to do with January 6, the filing claims (without quoting him).

The defendant stated that he does not align politically with his family members and did not tell them that he “was going to a protest in support of [then President] Trump.”

[snip]

When the interviewing agents returned to the defendant’s motive, he explained that “something just snapped” after “watching everything, just everything getting worse.” The defendant wanted to do something “to the parties” because “they were in charge.” When asked why he placed the devices at the RNC and DNC, the defendant responded, “I really don’t like either party at this point.” The defendant also explained that the idea to use pipe bombs came from his interest in history, specifically the Troubles in Ireland. The defendant denied that his actions were directed toward Congress or related to the proceedings scheduled to take place on January 6.

But there are two holes in the detention affidavit.

First, it describes Cole taught himself how to make explosives from YouTube, and used Google Maps to decide where to plant the bombs.

According to the defendant, he learned to make the black powder from a video game that listed the ingredients, and he also viewed various science-related videos on YouTube to assist him in creating the devices.

[snip]

The defendant explained that he had used Google Maps to look up these locations in advance.

Both of those details should show up in a Google warrant.

The detention memo makes no mention of them (or of any Google warrant).

More stunning, the detention affidavit drops a key detail from the arrest affidavit: That he was on Capitol Hill on December 14, 2020.

The FBI has analyzed COLE’s purchase history associated with the Accounts. Between January 2018 and January 2021, COLE made a total of five purchases within Washington, D.C. on or about the following dates: January 13, 2018; January 16, 2018; October 31, 2019; December 5, 2020; and December 14, 2020.

Approximately three weeks before the pipe bombs were placed, on or about December 14, 2020, COLE made a purchase at a restaurant located near First and D Streets, Southeast. The restaurant is located across the street from the entrance to Rumsey Court on D Street, Southeast.

What the detention affidavit does reveal is that — starting on December 15, 2020 — the day after being on Capitol Hill and a full three weeks before planting the pipe bombs, Cole started factory resetting his phone.

A Samsung cellular device was seized from the defendant’s person at the time of his arrest. A forensic review of the device’s contents showed that between December 2020 and December 2025, the device recorded 943 events identified as a “factory reset” or “wipe,” including a “wipe” event approximately three hours before the defendant’s arrest on December 4, 2025.2

2 The first “factory reset” or “wipe” event took place on December 15, 2020. The next such event did not occur until July 15, 2022. From that date, the “factory reset” or “wipe” events occurred at least once a week. On some days, the device appears to have been wiped multiple times in the same day.

The alleged pipe bomber started exercising operational security the day after that trip to Capitol Hill, the scene of his alleged crime.

And now, Jeanine Pirro doesn’t want to talk about the trip he made there at all.

Update: Cole’s attorneys complain that DOJ is attempting to push his first appearance out to January 7 or 8, which would be past any 5-year statute of limitation (though his charged crimes have a longer 10-plus year statute of limtiation).

2. On December 28, 2025, when pressed on the question of proceeding with the preliminary hearing on December 30, the government asked to push the preliminary hearing to either January 7 or 8. That request comes too late and does not meet Rule 5.1(d)’s rigorous standard. The Court should confirm that December 30 is the preliminary hearing and detention hearing and direct the government to be prepared to present its evidence in support of probable cause.

[snip]

4. In its email to defense counsel, the government has identified no extraordinary circumstances; rather, the reasons referenced are ordinary scheduling matters and the possibility of a forthcoming indictment. Rule 5 “does not allow the [preliminary] hearing date” to be extended merely “to accommodate the pace of the grand jury investigation.” United States v. Gurary, 793 F.2d 468, 472 (2d Cir. 1986). And where the defendant does not consent—as he does not here—Rule 5.1(d) imposes “far more rigorous criteria” than the Speedy Trial Act’s ends-of-justice standard. Id. at 473; see also United States v. Fortenberry, 2014 WL 6969615, at *2 (D. Nev. Dec. 9, 2014) (“Rule 5.1 does not permit continuance solely to enable the government to avoid a preliminary hearing by securing an indictment.”) (citation omitted).

Update: This is a super minor point. But in the detention memo, DOJ quotes Cole as saying (this month), “I really don’t like either party at this point,” which is at least consistent with him having been a Trump supporter and souring on him.

A few paragraphs later, they change the tense of that, claiming he placed that opinion in 2020.

In his own words, the defendant did so because he did not “like either party,” but “they were in charge” and thus were, in the defendant’s mind, an appropriate target for extreme acts of violence.

And they turn it into a both-sides thing.

By his own admission, the defendant committed these chilling acts because he was unhappy with the response of political leaders on both sides of the political aisle to questions raised about the results of the 2020 election, and “something just snapped.” [my emphasis throughout]

It may well be that something about what Cole said makes it fair to put his animosity to both parties back in time to 2020, but that’s not the tense he used.

Additionally, this is the table DOJ uses to claim they found purchase records for all the components he used to make the bombs.

But this is misleading. While the table includes Lilly Miller sulfur dust, one of the things he said he used to make black powder (and charcoal, another, would be readily on hand), that’s actually a purchase 14 months earlier than any other component, and from a different store. But they didn’t find a purchase record for the potassium nitrate, which they say he said he got at Lowes (from which they have a bunch of other purchase records).

That sentence — “Border security is the primary element of national security” — comes from page 11 of the National Security Strategy.

Border security is the primary element of national security. Not one important element. The primary one.

That’s an insane assertion, of course. The military, the economy, real terrorism (including far right terrorism), cybersecurity, sovereign democracy all take a back seat to whatever Stephen Miller flunky had final control over the edit of the NSS, who wrote down something insane, prioritizing the border over all else.

I’ve been obsessing about that comment ever since I read it, and kept thinking of it as I read this long NYT article that purports to explain Trump’s “policy” to target Venezuela. The article came out after I wrote this post attempting to understand Stephen Miller’s most prominent reversal over the last year, and in-between these two Tweets that make it very clear Miller’s entire conception about immigration to the US — even his own family’s immigration to the US — is based off his historically ignorant fantasies.

The story might be better staged as a Coen Brothers buddy movie featuring Stephen Miller, channeling Dr. Strangelove, looking for any opportunity to push harder against immigration, preferably in the form of bombing, even if it contributes to the root cause of drug trafficking and immigration, while Marco Rubio pursues the most stale kind of Cuban-American politics.

The story is so rambling, presumably because the subject and the insanity requires it, that I will attempt to map it.

NYT claims the current focus on Venezuela started when Marco Rubio signed a deal with Nayib Bukele to deport 300 people to his concentration camp.

The seeds of militarizing the approach to Mr. Maduro and Venezuelans were planted in February, when Mr. Rubio struck a deal with Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian leader of El Salvador, at his lakeside villa: The United States would pay nearly $5 million to send about 300 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

Soon after his visit with Mr. Bukele, Mr. Rubio designated eight Latin American criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, topped the list.

Mr. Miller had already landed on a legal tool to bypass due process: the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law that permits immediate detention and deportations of citizens of a country that has invaded the United States or is at war with it.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order in March invoking the act, with a title warning of “the invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua.” In retrospect, the order was an important opening salvo against Mr. Maduro: It was the administration’s first formal framing of Mr. Maduro and the United States as being in a type of war. Contrary to a secret U.S. intelligence assessment, it said Tren de Aragua was an instrument of Mr. Maduro.

In this story, NYT is silent about Bukele’s goal with this deal — to obtain the return of MS-13 members who were testifying to his own ties to the gang (it is also silent about Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández). It nods to the multiple lies Trump’s Administration told to claim the men it was sending to CECOT were gang members or even criminals (something covered at more length in this story, which it links). But it doesn’t describe how by misrepresenting the men, the Trump Administration failed to fulfill the terms of the deal made with Bukele.

Stephen Miller’s lies were a problem even for Nayib Bukele.

But NYT also doesn’t explain a temporal problem with this story: As the next major section of the story explains, at the beginning of the Administration, Ric Grenell had gotten Nicolás Maduro to accept deportation flights.

It began when Cuban American lawmakers pressed Mr. Trump early this year to end Chevron’s Biden-era confidential license. After Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio announced in late February that they would do so, Mr. Maduro stopped accepting deportation flights of Venezuelans. Mr. Maduro had agreed to them on Jan. 31 with Richard Grenell, a special envoy for Mr. Trump.

One point of sending the men Stephen Miller falsely claimed were TdA members to CECOT was that Maduro was refusing to accept them. But Maduro had earlier agreed to accept them. So to understand the need to send planes full of men falsely claimed to be TdA members to Bukele’s concentration camp, you have to review Trump’s flip-flops on Chevron’s license to export Venezuelan oil.

That Chevron section goes like this:

• January 31: Maduro makes a deal with Grenell.
• February: Cuban-American Members of Congress (CAMC) pressure Trump to pull the Chevron license, which he does in late February (possibly between the time Rubio signs the deal with Bukele and the day 200 mostly-innocent men are loaded on planes?).
• Chevron CEO Mike Wirth notes that if Chevron can’t export Venezuela’s oil, China will do so.
• CAMC learn that Trump might reverse his decision, so threaten to vote against the Big Ugly Bill.
• Stephen Miller pitches Trump on murderboats.
• Trump lets Chevron license expire on May 27.
• CAMC vote to pass Big Ugly.
• Around the same time Trump considers a pardon for convicted drug kingpin Hernández, Marco Rubio sells Trump on a claim that Maduro is a drug kingpin.
• July: Based in part on Wirth’s China argument, Trump reverses course, again, on Chevron license, Maduro accepts the CECOT prisoners and releases 10 Americans, including a triple murderer.

So while Trump was helping Nayib Bukele bury his ties with a dangerous gang and weighing a pitch to free convicted drug kingpin Juan Orlando Hernández, he began entertaining the idea of using the claim that Maduro is a drug kingpin so he can satisfy Stephen Miller’s need to bomb something and Marco Rubio’s Cuban-American fantasies.

Meanwhile, for reasons NYT doesn’t fully explain (though it suggests this was about SCOTUS’ decisions against the Alien Enemies Act), Stephen Miller was searching for things to bomb.

At the same time, Mr. Miller was exploring policies unrelated to Venezuela that, like the deportations, had their roots in the so-called U.S. war on terror. He looked at the idea of bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. But it became clear that Mexican leaders would not consent, and the administration feared losing their cooperation on drug and migrant issues. The Washington Post reported earlier on Mr. Miller’s discussions about striking cartels in Mexico.

By early May, Mr. Miller’s team began asking for further options for using force against drug cartels.

White House officials and others bandied around relatively more constrained ideas, including using the C.I.A. to carry out covert strikes on docked boats that did not have people in them. But Mr. Miller’s team wanted to publicize the strikes. Officials also discussed blowing up fake drug boats to instill fear in traffickers. But Mr. Miller’s aides wanted the real thing, officials said.

This passage adds to what The Atlantic reported — that Miller wanted to murderbomb people “to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace.” But Miller demanded that he get real dead people, not just fake drug boats (and to be fair, given the degree to which various nations are tracking the specific people being murderboated, Miller was right that he needed real dead people for whatever purpose he believes this serves, even if his claim it serves that purpose is probably baseless).

Then Trump or Miller or Marco came up with a list of drug gangs they wanted to target, some of which have little relation to the danger the gangs represent, some of which are (like many of the claims about Tren de Aragua beforehand) invented.

On July 25, [Trump] signed a secret order telling the Pentagon to take action against drug-trafficking groups, putting in motion the targeting of Venezuelans.

[snip]

The two-page order contained a previously unreported written proposal for boat strikes. It directed Mr. Hegseth to target vessels in international waters carrying drugs for any of 24 Latin American “narco-terrorist” groups. The attached list included ones from Venezuela.

[snip]

The secret list of 24 groups included major cartels and groups that the Trump administration had formally designated as terrorists, along with numerous relatively obscure Mexican gangs. The same day Mr. Trump signed the directive, the Treasury Department announced sanctions against “Cartel de los Soles,” a slang term for drug corruption in Venezuela’s military, declaring it a terrorist organization led by Mr. Maduro. The name was at the bottom of Mr. Trump’s secret list.

And that’s where Trump’s flunkies turned to cutting and pasting legal rulings from the war on terror to be used in Stephen Miller’s campaign to create dead bodies that he can spin as evidence of the danger of immigrants.

Only, in their rush to brainlessly cut-and-paste from a WOT policy that was unsuccessful in its original incarnation, these geniuses failed to consider that drone strikes on the sea are different, legally, from drone strikes on land.

Around the same time, a Trump appointee with little national security law experience was drafting a Justice Department memo saying boat strikes would be lawful based on Mr. Trump’s wartime powers. The legal blessing was already developed by late July, when the Senate confirmed the top two lawyers responsible for reviewing such an operation — T. Elliot Gaiser, head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and Earl G. Matthews, Pentagon general counsel. They were essentially presented with a done deal.

[snip]

Mr. Hegseth signed an execute order that created the operational framework for the attacks. Dated Aug. 5 and written without input from many career Pentagon officials, it lifted language from previous orders developed for drone strikes against Al Qaeda targets in places like rural Yemen.

It lacked elements crucial to maritime operations — including any mention of what to do with shipwrecked survivors of an attack, officials said.

[snip]

The Pentagon also bypassed a process called the Maritime Operational Threat Response, used to get input from various agencies when proposing a maritime action with international implications, said William D. Baumgartner, a retired Coast Guard rear admiral and lawyer who oversaw Caribbean operations.

Which is how Miller, Rubio, and Whiskey Pete Hegseth got themselves in trouble for even worse murder, that of survivors of the initial drone strike.

But that wasn’t yet good enough for Strangelove Miller. One of his top aides then loosened the standards from what they were in the WOT.

During the planning, an aide to Mr. Miller, Anthony Salisbury, pushed the Pentagon for ways to expand the scope of the operations, including loosening standards — like the level of confidence military officials would need that a target meets the criteria. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised that the military establish targeting criteria using lessons learned from the post-Sept. 11 wars. Ms. Kelly, the White House spokeswoman, said the account of Mr. Salisbury’s role was “made up.”

The NYT story ends with the unresolved problem posed by murderboats — what to do with survivors.

On the same day, WaPo described what happened when one of the only survivors — a known drug trafficker — was returned to Ecuador.

The police arrived at the airport prepared to arrest a drug trafficker — a mariner whose crewmates the U.S. military had just killed.

Andrés Fernando Tufiño Chila was one of only two people known to have survived a U.S. strike on a vessel that the Trump administration alleged was smuggling drugs from South America. President Donald Trump had described the Ecuadorian and a fellow survivor of the Oct. 16 strike in the Atlantic Ocean as “terrorists” who would be returned to their countries of origin “for detention and prosecution.”

[snip]

Tufiño, then 41, stepped off the U.S. military plane at the Quito airport on the morning of Oct. 18 in shackles, cut and bruised from the attack but walking on his own, according to Col. Carlos Ortega, then the director of anti-narcotics for Ecuador’s national police. He was already a known trafficker: He had pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to cocaine distribution conspiracy in 2021 and served more than three years in a U.S. prison before he was deported home to Ecuador last year. Now the U.S. military had picked him up amid the wreckage of a semisubmersible vessel — a “narco sub.”

In his gang-controlled hometown, Tufiño was known as Fresco Solo, neighbors said, a skilled navigator who they alleged was recruited by criminals to smuggle drugs north.

But in transferring him to Ecuadorian custody, three officials here said, U.S. forces didn’t provide any evidence that could be used to detain him — no seized drugs, no phone or GPS records, no videos, none of the intelligence that led them to target his vessel.

On landing in Quito, U.S. officials told the Ecuadorians that the transfer was a “humanitarian” repatriation, Ortega said.

Within hours, Tufiño was let go.

There’s very little discussion in the NYT about what happens if Marco and his Cuban-American cheerleaders get their wish, a collapse of the Maduro and Cuban Communist regimes. As noted, they ignore the degree to which this policy has led to three drug traffickers — Hernández, Bukele, and Tufiño — going free. There actually is an interesting question about what will happen to the drug trade if the US makes sea trafficking less lucrative after having shut down the US-Mexico border to illegal entries. Drug markets don’t disappear; they morph, and such shifts can bring really serious unintended consequences.

After all, one of Miller’s blind spots are the American citizens who play a key role in all this trafficking. And by treating drug trafficking as an immigrant problem, he surely makes it easier for citizens to go undetected — the kind of detail real drug criminals tend not to miss.

Meanwhile “China” is mentioned just twice in NYT’s 3,400-word article laying out how a rather senseless “policy” on Latin America has developed. But then these are the same geniuses who started a trade war with China that gave China a great deal of new leverage over the United States based, in part, on claims of fentanyl trafficking.

As noted, this NYT story really would be better as a humorous buddy flick, because it is so full of idiocy.

Update: Trump is murderboating off invented intelligence not just against Latin America; it appears he did the same in Nigeria.

There have been a slew of profiles or useful commentary on Stephen Miller this year:

• January 16, 2025: NYT describes how he built power (with a focus on his cultivation of Mark Zuckerberg)
• March 10, 2025: David Klion reviews Jean Guerrero’s 2021 biography, Hatemonger, with an eye on understanding Stephen Miller’s Jewish background
• May 9, 2025: NYT considers Stephen Miller’s (thus far, at least, abandoned) attack on habeas corpus
• May 30, 2025: NYT traces Stephen Miller’s Salvadoran operation to his obsession with the Alien Enemies Act
• June 14, 2025: Guardian considers how the invasion of Los Angeles might be viewed as revenge
• June 20, 2025: WSJ describes how thoroughly Miller guides Trump’s White House
• June 25, 2025: ProPublica talks about Miller’s attempt to centralize investigations into organized crime
• July 7, 2025: Jason Zengerle compares Miller’s failures in the first term with his successes in this one, while considering what might halt that success
• September 15, 2025: Bulwark discusses Miller’s plan to exploit Charlie Kirk’s killing
• October 9, 2025: John Harwood argues Miller is uniquely fascist
• November 28, 2025: Andrew Egger and Catherine Rampell discuss his latest devious plans to strip work permits
• December 15, 2025: Greg Sargent reviews his xenophobic plans
• December 18, 2025: WaPo describes how he started with a plan to attack Mexico but instead murderboated Venezuelans

There are more I’m still searching for; I’ll add them when I find links.

There has also been great reporting on what happened to the Venezuelan men sent to CECOT, including multiple ProPublica articles, this Frontline documentary, the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss killed, and this Tim Miller interview.

There has even been reporting on the weird relations the Trump administration has pursued with Venezuela, first sending Ric Grenell to negotiate and then moving an entire fleet to murderboat Venezuela into submission. The Atlantic’s version of the latter describes that, “Stephen Miller views the air strikes as an opportunity to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace” — murder as propaganda tactic.

There were reports when the Venezuelan men were sent home in July as part of a prisoner swap for ten Americans.

But in spite of the sustained focus on Stephen Miller, the CECOT operation, and Trump’s turn to Venezuela, I’m aware of no story that explains how — much less why — the Administration shifted from staging stunts in the Oval Office with Nayib Bukele and claiming Trump is helpless to do anything about the men he sent to torture, to instead sending them all to Venezuela as part of a purported prisoner swap.

To be sure, there’s a sense of what could explain the move.

Maybe Trump’s team just used the Salvadoran concentration camp to pressure Nicolás Maduro to accept its own deportees. Maybe the sustained focus on the prison — to say nothing of coverage of witnesses who tied Bukele to MS-13 — created problems for the Salvadoran strongman. Maybe the attention on Kilmar Abrego and his release raised pressure to release the others. Maybe one or two of the Americans stuck in Venezuela were that valuable to the Administration to make the swap worthwhile (aside from the ex-Marine triple murderer freed as a result of the swap, there has been far less focus on the Americans who were released than on the Venezuelans the US sent away). Maybe after John Sauer was confirmed in early April and he reviewed the paperwork — to say nothing of SCOTUS’ intervention on Easter weekend to prevent another AEA deportation operation — Miller was informed that his AEA deportations would be unsustainable even with a court packed to support Trump.

All of those are possible. None have been substantiated in reliable reporting.

And as a result, we don’t know what it looks like when one of Stephen Miller’s most extreme experiments with fascism fails. Aside from the public reporting on tensions between Grenell and Marco Rubio, there’s no discussion of whether Stephen Miller also lost out in a political dispute and if so how, or whether he was just placated by the opportunity to serially murderboat Latinos as a consolation prize.

Even the Administration is hiding how this went down. When the government told its story, as part of Judge Boasberg’s since re-halted contempt inquiry, of how it blew off Boasberg’s order to return the flights to El Salvador back in March, they did not include Stephen Miller in that story.

1. At approximately 6:45 PM on March 15, 2025, the Court orally directed counsel for the Government to inform his clients of the Court’s oral directives at the hearing, including statements directing that any removed class members “need to be returned to the United States.” By that point, two flights carrying individuals designated under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) had already departed from the United States and were outside United States territory and airspace.

2. At approximately 7:25 PM, the Court memorialized its temporary restraining order in a written order, as the Court had indicated at the hearing it would do. The written order enjoined Defendants “from removing” class members pursuant to the AEA. The written order, unlike the oral directives, said nothing about returning class members who had already been removed.

3. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign promptly conveyed both this Court’s oral directives and its written order to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), through its Office of General Counsel, and to the leadership of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

4. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove provided DHS with legal advice regarding the Court’s order as to flights that had left the United States before the order issued, through DHS Acting General Counsel Joseph Mazzara. Mr. Mazzara then conveyed that legal advice, as well as his own legal advice, to Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem. See 6 U.S.C. § 113(a)(1)(J). After receiving that legal advice, Secretary Noem directed that the AEA detainees who had been removed from the United States before the Court’s order could be transferred to the custody of El Salvador. As explained below, that decision was lawful and was consistent with a reasonable interpretation of the Court’s order.

5. Although the substance of the legal advice given to DHS and Secretary Noem is privileged, the Government has repeatedly explained in its briefs—both in this Court and on appeal—why its actions did not violate the Court’s order, much less constitute contempt. Specifically, the Court’s written order did not purport to require the return of detainees who had already been removed, and the earlier oral directive was not a binding injunction, especially after the written order.

It all happened without any involvement from Stephen Miller, if you can believe that.

There’s certainly reason to believe that if Erez Reuveni told his side of the story (testimony that was also thwarted by the DC Circuit’s renewed stay of the contempt proceeding), these redacted bits might disclose the role of the White House in the decision.

But in spite of all the profiles describing — credibly, to be sure — that Miller is really the one running most policy out of the White House, the government has gone to some lengths to avoid confirming that in legal contexts, perhaps for all the legal problems that would arise if Trump had to explain how he’s not the one who signed the Alien Enemies Act.

Vanity Fair’s profile of Susie Wiles described — and seemingly quoted her as agreeing — the deportation effort as a failure.

In mid-March, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) shackled and herded 238 immigrants onto transport planes and flew them to a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison. According to Trump, the men were members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang, but the evidence was sketchy (often based on tattoos alone). Most had committed no serious crimes; one, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported by mistake, the Trump administration admitted.

“I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” Wiles told me at the time.

When we spoke again in April, in cities across the country, masked ICE agents were snatching people off the street, throwing them in vans, and zip-tying and frog-marching them into makeshift deportation camps. Many were US citizens or entitled to be here. (ProPublica documented 170 cases in the first nine months of 2025 of US citizens being caught up in ICE’s dragnet.)

“If somebody is a known gang member who has a criminal past, and you’re sure, and you can demonstrate it, it’s probably fine to send them to El Salvador or whatever,” Wiles told me. “But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.” But as the usa.gov site itself notes, “In some cases, a noncitizen is subject to expedited removal without being able to attend a hearing in immigration court.”

But there’s no hint that the Administration as a whole shares the opinion attributed to Wiles, and Miller’s other abusive deportations have continued with no pause.

Photographer Christopher Anderson’s two descriptions of taking that photograph of Miller, which Vanity Fair sandwiched right in the middle of the El Salvador discussion, may be one of the few pieces of journalism describing Miller’s vulnerabilities.

What is the encounter you remember most?

For me the most interesting encounter for the day was with Stephen Miller. I find him to be a really interesting character on many levels, both at this moment in time and just what he represents and how he carries himself. He’s not someone who’s been photographed a lot in this way. So he was clearly a little bit nervous about sitting for a portrait, and he asked a lot of questions. “Why are you doing this? Why are you shooting film as opposed to shooting digital? Why do you know what that thing does? And how does it look? How am I? How do I look sitting here? Does it look like I’m slouching?” And at one point, I said to him, “you know, the people may say a lot of things about you, but slouching is not one of the things they will accuse you of.” And at the end of the session he comes up to me to say goodbye, and he says, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people,” meaning kind to people in my pictures. And I looked at him, and I said, “Yeah, you know, you do too.” It was interesting to me, his reaction. But just being in that place is in itself a fascinating experience, to be kind of within the halls of that kind of power, but yet to see it that it is a little bit [like] the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. The place is small and shabby and you see paint marks on the wall, the wiring is done in a shabby way, and the desks can be messy, and it’s—I guess it’s a little bit like looking at middle management at a lot of companies.

[snip]

Is there anything the readers haven’t yet noticed in your pictures?

There’s the one Easter egg that I hoped people might see, and maybe they are starting to see a little bit, is that I had Stephen Miller sit underneath one of the oil paintings in the Roosevelt Room that is a beautiful depiction of Native Americans crossing a river on horseback to return to their teepee village home. It was one of those things that—I found it to be kind of interesting and maybe incongruous, that I thought might be picked up on. Go look, go look for it.

But while a bunch of the Miller profiles talk about how powerful he is (most have sources protected by further anonymity describing how much some portion of Republicans in Congress hate him), few to none talk about what a Miller setback in this administration looks like.

I’ve been thinking about that as part of my year-end inventory of what we’ve learned this year.

To halt Trump’s worst abuses, Stephen Miller must be made toxic — which is not hard to do, at least not if people are granted anonymity. The costs his bigotry causes — the dollar signs, the trade-offs the monomaniacal implementing of his bigotry entails, the human cost of prioritizing bigotry over saving children from sexual assault — must be made visible.

But it would also become necessary to understand what confluence of events could lead Miller to experience a policy setback. Preferably not just one setback, but all of them, a collapse of his near-monopoly on the President’s ear and therefore on policy.

Contrary to his well-curated press, Stephen Miller is not omnipotent. His slovenly execution makes him even more vulnerable. He hates when his physical tics are visible; he probably also hates that his paunch appears in that same photo.

His long-planned bid to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport men based off soccer tattoos to be indefinitely tortured failed.

And we don’t know how or why it failed.

Update: This NYT story fills in some of the circumstances surrounding these events — describing a team that makes shit up on the fly, excludes experts, and then changes their mind months later. At its core is a flipflop (or perhaps cynical manipulation of Cuban-American legislators) on Chevron’s license to export oil from Venezuela.

It began when Cuban American lawmakers pressed Mr. Trump early this year to end Chevron’s Biden-era confidential license. After Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio announced in late February that they would do so, Mr. Maduro stopped accepting deportation flights of Venezuelans. Mr. Maduro had agreed to them on Jan. 31 with Richard Grenell, a special envoy for Mr. Trump.

Chevron’s chief executive, Mike Wirth, lobbied the administration for a license extension, speaking to Mr. Trump several times over the coming months.

The Cuban American lawmakers got wind that the license could be extended, and they threatened to withhold their votes for Mr. Trump’s signature legislation, “the One Big Beautiful Bill.”

At the Oval Office meeting in late May, Mr. Trump told Mr. Rubio and Mr. Miller that he needed to get the bill passed. But he said he had heard about the downsides of ending the license, including that Chinese companies would take over Chevron’s stakes, said an official.

The president demanded options. That was when Mr. Miller offered to help. He had been nurturing his ideas for mass deportations and boat strikes.

Mr. Trump did not renew Chevron’s license when it expired on May 27. His domestic policy bill passed Congress five weeks later.

The president held a series of White House meetings on whether to strike at Venezuela. At one in the early summer that included Mr. Rubio, Mr. Miller and Mr. Grenell, Mr. Rubio argued that Mr. Maduro was a drug kingpin, a characterization that appeared to stick with Mr. Trump, an official said.

In late July, Mr. Trump reversed course on Chevron’s license. He ordered the Treasury Department to issue one with revised terms. That happened around the time Mr. Maduro freed 10 American prisoners in exchange for the more than 250 Venezuelans that the Trump administration had sent to CECOT, the Salvadoran prison. And Mr. Trump had been swayed by Mr. Wirth’s argument that Chevron was a bulwark against China.

But behind the scenes, Mr. Trump set a course for confrontation. On July 25, he signed a secret order telling the Pentagon to take action against drug-trafficking groups, putting in motion the targeting of Venezuelans.