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.

Something hilarious happened this week.

On Tuesday, Trump’s White House got Marc Caputo to write a credulous column platforming their laughable claims that they’re not responsible for how chaotic the release of the Epstein files has been, that the whole Epstein thing is just unfair to poor Donald Trump. Caputo’s column — the dutiful repetition of even ridiculous claims — is a read of Trump’s own perception of the challenge before him.

But before Caputo got to Trump’s flimsy excuses and the more damning detail — that the White House had taken over DOJ’s Xitter account — he started with his headline scoop: He allowed his sources to claim that the pain of this release will last one more week (that is, a week from Tuesday).

Only one more week.

Scoop: Trump administration expects Epstein files release could last another week

The Trump administration estimates it has about one week to go — and as many as 700,000 more pages to review — before it finishes releasing all the Jeffrey Epstein files.

[snip]

• This will end soon,” another official said. “The conspiracy theories won’t.”

Imagine putting that prediction in writing!

The prediction lasted less than a day.

Even at the time, CNN was reporting that SDFL’s US Attorney’s Office has just solicited “volunteers” to work over the holiday to make this a one-week story.

The Justice Department’s leadership asked career prosecutors in Florida to volunteer over the “next several days” to help redact the Epstein files, in the latest Trump administration push toward releasing the hundreds of thousands of photos, internal memos and other evidence around the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

A supervising prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida’s US Attorney’s Office emailed the entire district office on Tuesday — two days before Christmas — announcing an “emergency request from the [Deputy Attorney General’s] office the SDFL must assist with,” according to a copy of the email reviewed by CNN. “We need AUSAs to do remote document review and redactions related to the Epstein files,” the email said.

Then, DOJ explained why they needed the volunteers: they (claim they) just discovered a million more pages.

This thing won’t be done in a week or even a month. And the people smoking Caputo need to understand that’s partly due to Todd Blanche’s incompetence, and partly due to the stuff that is a cover-up.

You’re likely to disagree with this opinion, because conventional wisdom on the left holds that the chaos of the Jeffrey Epstein releases to date reflects an attempted cover-up. But the chaos we’re seeing in the Jeffrey Epstein release is not (yet), primarily, a cover-up — though DOJ is flouting the law in ways that will create further scandal that may be entirely unrelated to protecting Donald Trump.

What you’re seeing is incompetence — frankly, the same incompetence we’ve seen from day one on Trump’s efforts to corral the Epstein conspiracy theories which his followers thrive.

Consider the things that have been identified as evidence of an imagined cover-up:

• Documents from a civil lawsuit published to docket at different times, adopting different standards of redaction, and therefore revealing accusations against Trump in just one of them
• Documents from a civil lawsuit adopting reversible redaction
• The handwritten letter claiming to be from Epstein to Larry Nasser purportedly written just before Epstein’s death

These actually could be readily explainable (and, indeed, all three fit one of the five rules on how to read Epstein files that Ankush Khardori offered on the day of the release — understand what kind of files you’re reading, and the biases people harbor or lies people will tell). For example, if DOJ had released the files with an inventory of the kinds of things the release would include, and the known reliability issues with various kinds of documents, then people might have been prepared to treat the claims made in civil suits with some skepticism. If DOJ had released the alleged Epstein letter with FBI’s own analysis of it, it would have persuaded people that the letter is a fake, if it is.

But DOJ did not do that.

Instead, Todd Blanche sat for a softball interview with Kristen Welker in which he did the following:

• Falsely claimed that the delay in responding arose from any concern for the survivors
• Guaranteed that all mention of Trump would be unredacted
• Alluded to the real reasons for overredaction, which Welker of course ignored
• Repeated his past bullshit excuses for letting Ghislaine Maxwell lie to his face with impunity before getting moved to Club Fed and getting a puppy
• [Unrelatedly, but still problematically, falsely claimed politicized prosecutions did not involve Trump]

The key answer here was Blanche’s claim that DOJ needs to redact for reasons other than protecting victims.

KRISTEN WELKER:

Well, you’re talking about protecting the victims. The law directed the Justice Department to “release internal DOJ communications including emails, memos, meeting notes concerning decisions to charge, not charge, investigate or decline to investigate Epstein or his associates.” That’s the crux of what many of the victims or the survivors say they want to see. Why wasn’t that information prioritized in the first release, Mr. Blanche?

DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE:

Well, first of all it was. And there are numerous documents released on Friday that address what you just quoted from, from the statute that address internal communications within the Department of Justice and internal communications between law enforcement and the Department of Justice. But it’s for the same reason. Because many of those internal communications talk about victims. Many of those internal back and forths between prosecutors and law enforcement talk about victims and their stories. And that has to be redacted. And by the way, everybody expects us to redact that. So the same complaints that we’re hearing yesterday and even this morning from Democrats and from others screaming loudly from a hill about lack of production on Friday, imagine if we had released tons of information around victims? That would be the true crime. That would be the true wrong. And if anybody out there, I heard Congressman Raskin, the Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, releasing statements accusing Attorney General Bondi, Director Patel and myself of not doing our jobs. If they have an issue with me protecting victims, they know how to get a hold of me. But we’re not going to stop doing it.

[snip]

KRISTEN WELKER:

Okay. Let’s delve more deeply into the redactions. Is any information about President Trump redacted in any of the files that have or will be released?

DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE:

No. Not unless it’s supposed to be redacted under the law, which means victim information or any sort of privilege like attorney-client privilege. But I have no reason to believe that the lawyers that are working on this case were talking about President Trump. Because he had nothing to do with the Epstein files. He had nothing to do with the horrific crimes that Mr. Epstein committed. And so I don’t expect there will be anything redacted. But the short answer is we are not redacting information around President Trump, around any other individual involved with Mr. Epstein. And that narrative, which is not based on fact at all, is completely false. [my emphasis]

There aer several problems for Todd Blanche’s claim that there are other reasons that DOJ can redact information — he mentions attorney-client privilege, but that could quickly expand to executive privilege (indeed, elsewhere in the interview he asserts he’ll never share his communications with Trump) or deliberative. The files are also being released with every DOJ identity redacted, including Audrey Strauss and Geoffrey Berman. That may have the temporary advantage, for DOJ, of hiding who was complicit in the sweetheart deal in 2007 and which real champions of the victims, like Maurene Comey, Trump fired right in this middle of this realease.

The problem for Blanche is that judges have already ruled (in unsealing grand jury materials) that the transparency law supersedes other protections.

The Act requires disclosure of Epstein grand jury materials by requiring disclosure of “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials.” Id. “All” is crystal clear and should be afforded its “ordinary, common-sense meaning.” … (where Congress was aware of a category and did not exclude the category from the statute, that category is covered).

And so Congress will go to Richard Berman and argue that by withholding privileged or deliberative documents or even prosecutors’ names, DOJ is not complying with the law, and they’ll have precedent on their side.

Shit, Trump will be lucky if this only goes on for another month and not twelve.

The question Welker did not ask but should have is why DOJ is stuck doing this at the last minute if the FBI conducted an even bigger review of the files back in March. Why is DOJ in a mad rush to protect survivors now? Why wasn’t DOJ protecting survivors in March?

And the answer to that question is that, obviously, that earlier review was focused not on victims but on a political calculation: would the release of pictures of Bill Clinton in a public hotel pool in Brunei (which is what got released last week) outweigh the damage of files implicating Trump and his friends (starting with Les Wexner who was named as a potential co-conspirator in some documents already released), and that the conclusion of that earlier review, in July, was that this could not be weaponized like everything else, and so Trump and Todd Blanche personally attempted to pressure Congress to prevent this release at all costs but failed, which is why they’re stuck doing a second last minute review after the earlier one in March.

And eventually, all that — including whatever lists they made in March that Blanche probably hopes to shield under claims of privilege — should be ripe for release under the law. The incompetence of this first release will lead to iterative later releases.

Which brings us to the excuses Caputo platformed. As he describes, everyone is just exasperated, because how dare people take top Trump supporters like Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec and Benny Johnson and Kash Patel and Dan Bongino seriously when they focus on these files?

Behind the scenes: There’s a palpable sense of exasperation and annoyance in the administration about all of the headlines pertaining to Trump and Epstein and the inability to explain everything and just get the disclosure done.

• “It’s a combination of extreme frustration at everything: at what Congress did, at our response to it, and a concern that it won’t go away,” an official said.
• “There’s also a little bit of indignation at the media — that this wasn’t even a story for years and years. And now, not only is it a story, but the top of many news pages on a given day.”

How dare Trump’s trolls make this a huge story?!?!?!?!

This remains the problem with Blanche’s actions and everyone else’s. They’re misunderstanding that this is the scandal they rode in on.

They can’t just rely on past tools — like weaponization, like focusing on Clinton (as Trump attempted in his most recent wail about Epstein).

Because the Epstein scandal exists not because of anything Jamie Raskin or Ro Khanna did. The Epstein scandal exists because the conspiracism of it is the core of Trump’s power. Epstein conspiracy theories were always non-falsifiable (which I wrote about here and here and a bunch of other places).

And by attempting to bulldoze Congress on the big issues — on DOJ’s own prerogatives — Todd Blanche is only going to make things worse by creating new scandals.

It has been a melancholy Christmas, with so much loss — Howie Klein, Rob Reiner. Rayne’s dad fighting in RFK’s anti-science world.

A cherished local community closed here in Limerick yesterday, a rare craft beer pub, which opened during COVID, remained aggressively welcoming to all, yet closed yesterday after the local government shut down the parklets created during COVID. We were in no way regulars, but when we stopped by yesterday the talk was still focused on where to rebuild a community.

Creches across the United States have depicted Jesus, Mary, and Joseph gone — snatched away by goons.

Which is part of the story, isn’t it? That amid a horrible empire beset by politicized trials, a leader, and after him, many leaders rose up out of the persecution?

2025 was a terrible year. But it was a year when new leaders rose up — and more importantly, average people everywhere stood up, blowing whistles to stop the madness.

It was a start.

May you all have a wonderful day to renew, reflect, and carry on.

Merry Christmas!

After Trump spent a year destroying government, there have been several attempts in recent days to tell the story of what Trump took away with his assault on government. This is a story we need to tell, and tell far better, in the new year if we want to hold Trump accountable and not just reverse the damage he did, but use his destruction as a way to rebuild better.

Consider this WaPo story, “The year Trump broke the federal government.”

It tells the stories of hundreds of Federal workers, including those who left and those who stayed through the DOGE and Russ Vought massacres. It is great! But it also only mirrors the full story (and potentially buried in a holiday weekend).

It very poignantly captures the cruelty of Trump’s firings, such as this anecdote about a woman killing herself just after Elon Musk’s Five Things emails started.

In Virginia, the family of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services worker Caitlin Cross-Barnet checked her into a mental health facility. She was struggling with despair after a difficult hysterectomy, and because she felt Trump was unraveling the government. In daily calls to her husband, she asked about changes to the federal workforce. Six days after the “What did you do” email, she killed herself.

While it describes many benefits shuttered, it doesn’t describe what happened to the people affected by these losses.

What happened, for example, when those working a suicide prevention line could no longer offer their clients privacy?

Veterans who called to confess thoughts of suicide could hear people speaking in the background.

What happened when LGBTQ+ veterans stopped showing up for counseling appointments?

The psychologist’s LGBTQ+ patients stopped showing up to their appointments.

What is the impact of rising rates of mental illnesses among service members, now left neglected in the wake of another firing?

Another morning gone with no chance to turn to his studies of rising rates of mental illness among service members. Or his proposals, languishing for almost a year now, on how the government could drive those down.

What happened when the government fired a bunch of people focusing on educational access for Native Americans (even while moving health experts to Indian Health Services)?

Her job was helping administer grants to support Native American students. Then she remembered. She’d once served as president of an affinity group for Native Americans and Alaskans at the department.

You might ask what happened to the people Erica Hagen might be harmed in advance of her firing.

She thought about all the frozen programs she had helped oversee: One treating and preventing HIV. Another educating children in rural areas. A third reducing plastic in the oceans.

But a number of people have told the story of what happened with Marco Rubio cut USAID, both in sheer terms — the hundreds of thousands who’ve already died and the 14 million who may one day die, but also the children dying of hunger in Kenya or the cholera outbreak in South Sudan.

What happened to those who might benefit from sustainable energy programs that got cut?

At the Energy Department, one worker prepared memos arguing that his projects would cut costs for American homes and businesses. Someone decided to cancel many anyway. So he, like other employees, began deleting: Any mention of “carbon.” “Sustainability.” The word “green.”

What about FDA inspections that didn’t happen? Who got sick?

A Food and Drug Administration staffer couldn’t purchase dry ice or environmental swabs, nor pay the highway tolls that safety inspectors incurred driving for work.

One I’m self-interested in, as a former Great Lakes resident, what happened when they cut the carp program?

In the Midwest, union leader Colin Smalley watched his Army Corps of Engineers unit dwindle. Among the departed: An employee so knowledgeable about rock blasting that the government brought him back the first time he tried to retire. A staffer who was spearheading a novel project to stun invasive carp with electric shocks. How, Smalley asked his wife, could they ever replace someone who knew how to electrify rivers?

The answer, I think, is that this is one of the few things Gretchen Whitmer won by normalizing Trump.

The story describes how Trump’s cuts delayed efforts to prepare Colorado  for fire season — ostensibly something Trump cares about. But did it exacerbate fires or did we get lucky?

In a Colorado branch of the Forest Service, one man was designated purchaser for the entire office. Anyone who wanted to buy horse fodder or irrigation pipes had to wait until the man returned from weeks-long firefighting trips. The new system meant staff were a week late buying chainsaw fuel, delaying the thinning of flammable forest brush. “In 15 years, I have never seen us so unprepared for fire season,” the local fire management officer told staff at a meeting, according to one worker in attendance.

The nation’s parks and forests are rotting from neglect. What does that look like?

In Lander, Wyoming, three Forest Service retirees noticed fences tilting over, docks slipping into lakes, mountain roads caving inward from water pressure.

Like the USAID cuts, this is story that is already getting told elsewhere; it is a story that is generating a lot of localized anger.

This great video from Molly Jong-Fast, which includes a bunch of great regulators — like Lina Khan, Alvaro Bedoya, Doha Mekki, and Elizabeth Wilkins — who got fired addresses many of these impact questions.

I’m a big fan of all these people and Khan (who’ll have a platform working for Mayor Mamdani) can explain the import of regulation to anyone. All of these fired experts are exceptional at explaining how overturning regulation harms people, like construction workers or taxi drivers or renters or chicken farmers.

But imagine a video that started from one or another harm that mentioned repeatedly — such as the harms, including encouraging suicide, caused by bots and AI. That’s a story that would resonate with mothers, as opposed to primarily Democrats who want to strategize how to reverse Trump’s destruction.

To be sure: at 39:00, Wilkins talks about how important story telling is. She describes that we need to explain all this in terms of villains. “Tell the story of who is the bad guy in this story, who is the hero of this story.” But we also need to invite every American into the story, because they’ve lost something from Trump’s assault on government.

One (very) simple example really resonated with me, at least. In a piece explaining the value  of NCAR to Americans in advance of Trump’s assault on it, It’s just a list of eight things that are not (as Russ Vought targeted) “climate alarmism.”

In accessibly wonky terms, it translates some of the things NCAR does — like making flights safer — into things people care about.

As a child, I remember hearing news stories about commercial airplanes crashing due to wind shear. Microbursts, which are localized downburst of sinking air associated with thunderstorms, were often the culprit. The Low-Level Wind Shear Alert System developed by NCAR researchers has helped to virtually eliminate microburst-related wind shear crashes. Such advances, along with Terminal Doppler Radar, are examples of the R&D machine at work for our benefit even as you may not realize it as your plane takes off or lands safely. Additionally, many of the computer algorithms used to alert pilots and airline managers about turbulence were developed at NCAR. Likewise, NCAR’s aircraft icing products have been a staple in the aviation industry and distributed by NOAA’s Aviation Weather Center.

Regular fliers are already outraged by the continued enshittification of air travel, including Crash Sean Duffy’s reversal of consumer protection rules imposed by Pete Buttigieg.

Here’s one aspect, turbulence, that Trump is actively planning to make worse.

Again, I think all of these are really good stories. I’m just looking ahead — not to elections, or even to what Khan will do as a key aide to the Mayor of New York — but to ways we can better tell stories about what Trump took away, about what Trump stole from the American people, so we can hold him accountable.

President Trump arrived late to a healthcare announcement yesterday and didn’t take any questions.

Starting around the same time, DOJ launched some of the most complexly executed Friday Night News dumps going.

Epstein Limited Hangout

The big attraction was the release of the first batch of the Epstein files. The limited release violates the law, which required all files to be released yesterday.

Instead, there were a whole bunch of Bill Clinton photos, the document reflecting Maria Farmer’s complaint from 1996, that went ignored for years, and redacted grand jury transcripts that clearly violate the law. [Update: They have now released the SDNY ones.] The government did not release the proposed indictment and prosecution memo for the indictment that should have been filed in 2007; that may be sealed as deliberative.

Todd Blanche’s wildly dishonest letter (particularly with regards to his claimed concern for victims, after being admonished repeatedly by judges for failing to take that responsibility seriously and a last minute bid that promised but failed to put Pam Bondi on the phone) explaining the release emphasizes how Bondi took over a hundred national security attorneys off their job hunting hackers and spies to conduct a second review; it does not mention the even bigger review the FBI accomplished in March.

The review team consisted of more than 200 Department attorneys working to determine whether materials were responsive under the Act and. if so, whether redactions or withholding was required, The review had multiple levels. First, 187 attorneys from the Department’sNational Security Division (NSD) conducted a review of all items produced to JMD for responsiveness and any redactions under the Act. Second, a quality-control team of 25 attorneys conducted a second-level review to ensure that victim personally identifying information wasproperly redacted and that materials that should not be redacted were not marked for redaction.The second-level review team consisted of attorneys from the Department’s Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties (OPCL) and Office of Information Policy (OIP)—these attorneys are experts in privacy rights and reviewing large volumes of discovery. After the second-level review team completed its quality review, responsive materials were uploaded onto the website for public production as required under the Act. See Sec. 2(a). Finally, Assistant United States Attorneys from the Southern District of New York reviewed the responsive materials to confirm appropriate redactions so that the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York could certify that victim identifying information was appropriately protected.

That John Eisenberg’s department was in charge of a second pass on these documents is of some interest; there’s no specific competence Nat Sec attorneys would have, but Eisenberg has helped Trump cover stuff up in the past, most notably the transcript of his perfect phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Thus far the limited hangout has shifted the focus onto Clinton and away from Trump, but as Kyle Cheney lays out, it risks creating a WikiLeaks effect, in which a focus remains on Epstein for weeks or even months.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed Friday that the documents would be released on a rolling basis through the holidays — and possibly beyond. And, in court papers filed shortly after Friday’s partial release, the Justice Department emphasized that more files are still undergoing a review and redaction process to protect victims and new Trump-ordered investigations before they can be released.

The daily drip is a remarkable result for President Donald Trump, who has urged his allies to move past the Epstein files — prompting jeers from Democrats who say he’s trying to conceal details about his own longtime relationship with Epstein. Trump has maintained for years that he and Epstein had a falling out years ago, and no evidence has suggested that Trump took part in Epstein’s trafficking operation. Trump advocated for the release of the files only after Republicans in Congress rebuffed his initial pleas to keep them concealed.

[snip]

Trump is no stranger to the political power of intermittent disclosures of derogatory information. In 2016, Trump led the charge to capitalize on the hack-and-leak operation that led to daily publications of the campaign emails of Hillary Clinton and her top allies. The steady drumbeat of embarrassing releases — amplified by Trump and a ravenous press corps — helped sink Clinton’s campaign in its final weeks.

And that’s before the political and legal response to this limited hangout. Some victims are already expressing disappointment — most notably, by the redaction of grand jury material and names they know they shared, as well as the draft indictment from Florida.

Tom Massie and Ro Khanna, while originally giving DOJ the benefit of the doubt, are now contemplating measures they can take — potentially including contempt or impeachment — to enforce this law.

After Fox News was the first to report that the names of some politically exposed persons would be redacted, DOJ’s favorite transcriptionist Brooke Singman told a different story.

And Administration officials are getting burned by Elon’s fascism machine for their dishonesty.

Once again, Trump’s top flunkies may be overestimating their ability to contain their scandal.

Todd Blanche behind the selective prosecution

Meanwhile, efforts by those same flunkies to punish Kilmar Abrego continue to impose costs.

There have been parallel proceedings with Abrego in the last month. Just over a week ago in his immigration docket, Judge Paula Xinis ordered Kilmar Abrego to be released from ICE custody for the first time since March, and then issued another order enjoining DHS from taking him back into custody at a check-in the next day. Effectively, Xinis found the government had been playing games for months, making claims they had plans to ship Abrego to one or another African country instead of Costa Rica, which had agreed to take him. Those games were, in effect, admission they had no order of removal for him, and so could no longer detain him.

[B]ecause Respondents have no statutory authority to remove Abrego Garcia to a third country absent a removal order, his removal cannot be considered reasonably foreseeable, imminent, or consistent with due process. Although Respondents may eventually get it right, they have not as of today. Thus, Abrego Garcia’s detention for the stated purpose of third country removal cannot continue.

But even as that great drama was happening, something potentially more dramatic was transpiring in Abrego’s criminal docket.

Back on December 4, Judge Waverly Crenshaw, who had been receiving, ex parte, potential evidence he ordered the government turn over in response to Abrego’s vindictive prosecution claim, canceled a hearing and kicked off a fight over disclosures with DOJ. Four days later he had a hearing with the government as part of their bid for partial reconsideration, but then provided a limited set of exhibits to Kilmar’s attorneys.

Then yesterday, in addition to a request that Judge Crenshaw gag Greg Bovino — who keeps lying about Abrego — Abrego’s team submitted filings in support of the bid to dismiss the indictment. One discloses that Todd Blanche’s office was pushed by people within Blanche’s office, including Aakash Singh, who is centrally involved in Blanche’s other abuse of DOJ resources, including by targeting George Soros.

Months ago now, this Court recognized that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s “remarkable” admission that this case was brought because “a judge in Maryland…questioned” the government’s decision to deport Mr. Abrego and “accus[ed] us of doing something wrong”1 may “come close to establishing actual vindictiveness.” (Dkt. 138 at 7-8). The only thing the Court found missing from the record was evidence “tying [Mr. Blanche’s statements] to actual decisionmakers.” (Id. at 8). Not anymore. Previously, the Court rightly wondered who placed this case on Mr. McGuire’s desk and what their motivations were. (Dkt. 185 at 2). We now know: it was Mr. Blanche and his office, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, or “ODAG.” On April 30, 2025, just three days after Mr. McGuire personally took on this case, one of Mr. Blanche’s chief aides, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, told Mr. McGuire that this case was a [redacted]2 (Abrego-Garcia000007). That same day, Mr. Singh asked Mr. McGuire: [redacted] (Abrego-Garcia000008). Mr. McGuire responded with a timing update, saying he wanted to about a strategic question, and assuring Mr. Singh [redacted] and [redacted] (Abrego-Garcia000008). These communications and others show, as the Court put it, that [redacted] and [redacted] (Dkt. 241 at 5, 7). The “remarkable” statements “com[ing] close” to establishing vindictiveness (Dkt. 138 at 7-8) came from the same place— ODAG—as the instructions to Mr. McGuire to charge this case. The only “independent” decision (Dkt. 199 at 1) Mr. McGuire made was whether to acquiesce in ODAG’s directive to charge this case, or risk forfeiting his job as Acting U.S. Attorney—and perhaps his employment with the Department of Justice—for refusing to do the political bidding of an Executive Branch that is avowedly using prosecutorial power for “score settling.”3

2 The Court’s December 3 opinion (Dkt. 241) remains sealed, and the discovery produced to the defense in connection with Mr. Abrego’s motion to dismiss for vindictive and selective prosecution was provided pursuant to a protective order requiring that “[a]ny filing of discovery materials must be done under seal pending further orders of this Court” (Dkt. 77 at 2). Although the defense does not believe that any of these materials should be sealed for the reasons stated in Mr. Abrego’s memorandum of law regarding sealing (Dkt. 264), the defense is publicly filing a redacted version of this brief out of an abundance of caution pending further orders of the Court.

3 See Chris Whipple, Susie Wiles Talks Epstein Files, Pete Hegseth’s War Tactics, Retribution, and More (Part 2 of 2), Vanity Fair (Dec. 16, 2025), https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-susie-wiles-interview-exclusive-part-2.

While the specific content of this discovery remains redacted, the gist of it is clear: Blanche’s office ordered Tennessee prosecutors to file charges against Abrego in retaliation for his assertion of his due process rights.

We know similar documents exist in other cases — most notably, that of LaMonica McIver, Jim Comey, and Letitia James — but no one else has succeeded in getting their hands on the proof.

The Jim Comey stall

Speaking of which, the news you heard about yesterday is that DOJ filed its notice of appeal in both the Jim Comey and Letitia James’ dismissals.

The move comes after DOJ tried to indict James again in Norfolk on December 4 and then tried again in Alexandria on December 11, after which the grand jury made a point of making the failure (and the new terms of the indictment, which Molly Roberts lays out here) clear; Politico first disclosed the Alexandria filings here.

But I think the more interesting development — filed close to the time of the notice of appeals (the notices landed in my email box around 5:44-46PM ET on the last Friday before Christmas and the emergency motion landed in my email box around 5:17PM) — was yet another emergency motion in the Dan Richman case, something DOJ (under Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer’s name) keeps doing. After Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued her ruling that sort of said DOJ had to return Dan Richman’s stuff and move the remaining copy to EDVA, DOJ filed an emergency motion asking for clarification and an extension and (in a footnote) reconsideration. After Kollar-Kotelly granted the extension and some clarification (while grumbling about the tardiness and largely blowing off the motion for reconsideration), DOJ asked for another extension. Then DOJ filed a motion just informing Kollar-Kotelly they were going to do something else, the judge issued a long docket order noting (in part) that DOJ had violated their assurances they wouldn’t make any copies of this material, then ordering Richman to explain whether he was cool with this material ending up someplace still in DOJ custody rather than EDVA.

In its December 12, 2025, Order, the Court ordered the Government to “return to Petitioner Richman all copies of the covered materials, except for the single copy that the Court [] allowed to be deposited, under seal, with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.” See Dkt. No. 20. The Court ordered the Government to certify compliance with its Order by 4:00 p.m. ET on December 15, 2025. Id. The Court further ordered that, until the Government certified compliance with its December 12 Order, the Government was “not to… share, disseminate, or disclose the covered materials to any person, without first seeking and obtaining leave of this Court.” See Order, Dkt. No. 20 at 2 (incorporating the terms of Order, Dkt. No. 10).

On December 15 (the Government’s original deadline to certify compliance with the Court’s December 12 Order), the Government requested a seven-day extension of its deadline to certify compliance with the Court’s December 12 Order. Dkt. No. 22. Petitioner Richman consented to this extension. Id. And the Government represented that it would “continue to comply with its obligation… not to access or share the covered materials without leave of the Court.” Id. at 11 (citing Order, Dkt. No. 10 and Order, Dkt. No. 20). So the Court granted the Government’s request for extension, thereby continuing the Government’s deadline to certify compliance with the Court’s December 12 Order to 4:00 p.m. ET on December 22. Order, Dkt. No. 26.

As of this date, the Government has not certified compliance with the Court’s December 12 Order. Accordingly, the Government is still under a Court order that prohibits it from accessing Petitioner Richman’s covered materials or sharing, disseminating, or disclosing Petitioner Richman’s covered materials to any person without first seeking and obtaining leave of this Court. See Dkt. No. 10; Dkt. No. 20; Dkt. No. 22; Dkt. No. 26. As the Government admits, the Government provided this copy of Petitioner Richman’s materials to the CISO “after the Government filed its emergency motion,” Gov’t’s Mot., Dkt. No. 31 at 1, fn. 1, in which the Government represented that it would “continue to comply with its obligation… not to access or share the covered materials without leave of the Court.” Dkt. No. 22 at 11.

In last night’s motion for emergency clarification (which had all the clarity of something written after a Christmas happy hour), DOJ explained that they couldn’t deposit the materials (which according to Kollar-Kotelly’s orders, would no longer have the single up-classified memo that Richman first shared his entire computer so FBI could get eight years ago) because there was no Classified Information Security Officer in the courthouse serving DOD, CIA, and ODNI. So they raised new complaints — basically, yet another motion for reconsideration. After having claimed, last week, that they had just a single copy of Richman’s data, they noted that actually they had it in a bunch of places, then pretended to be confused about storage devices.

d. The Court further clarified its order on December 16, 2025, stating that the Court “has not ordered the Government to delete or destroy any evidence.” ECF No. 27 at 2. But the Court has also instructed the Government that it may not “retain[] any additional copies of the covered materials.” ECF No. 20 at 2. The government has copies of the information in its systems and on electronic media. It is not clear how the government can avoid “retaining” the materials without deleting them.

e. The Court has not yet otherwise explained whether the Government must provide to Richman the original evidence “obtained in the Arctic Haze investigation (i.e., hard and/or flash drives and discs currently in the custody of the FBI,” ECF No. 22 at 9, some subset thereof (e.g., not including classified information), whether the Government must provide Richman the covered materials in some other fashion, and what else the Government must do (or not do) to comply with the December 12, 2025 order.

After they confessed, last week, that neither the discontinued e-Discovery software nor the now-retired and possibly impaired FBI agent could reconstruct what happened with Richman’s data five years ago, they insisted they were really keeping track of the data, Pinky Promise.

f. Notwithstanding the passage of time, changes in personnel, and the limits of institutional memory, the Government emphasizes that the materials at issue have at all times remained subject to the Department of Justice’s standard evidence-preservation, record-retention, and chain of custody protocols. The Government is not aware of any destruction, alteration or loss of original evidence seized pursuant to valid court-authorized warrants. Any uncertainty reflected in the Government’s present responses regarding the existence or accessibility of certain filtered or derivative working files does not undermine the integrity, completeness, or continued preservation of the original materials lawfully obtained and retained. The Government’s responses are offered to assist the Court in tailoring any appropriate relief under Rule 41(g) in a manner consistent with its equitable purpose, while preserving the Government’s lawful interests and constitutional responsibilities with respect to evidence obtained pursuant to valid warrants and subject to independent preservation obligations.

Every single thing about the treatment of Richman’s data defies this claim, which is why he had a Fourth Amendment injury to be redressed in the first place.

Nevertheless, in this their second motion fashioned as a motion for clarification, they they propose, can’t we just keep all the data and Pinky Promise not to do anything with it?

g. Rather than require the government to “return” or otherwise divest its systems of the information, the government respectfully suggests that the more appropriate remedy would simply be to direct the government to continue not to access the information in its possession without obtaining a new search warrant. It is not clear what Fourth Amendment interest would be served by ordering the “return” of copies of information (other than classified information) that is already in the movant’s possession, and that the government continues to possess, at least in the custody of a court (or the Department of Justice’s Litigation Security group, as may be appropriate given the presence of classified information). And the Court’s order properly recognizes that it is appropriate for the government to retain the ability to access the materials for future investigative purposes if a search warrant is obtained. ECF No. 20 at 1. Forcing transfer of evidentiary custody from the Executive Branch to the Judiciary would depart from the traditional operation of Rule 41(g), which is remedial rather than supervisory, and would raise substantial separation-of-powers concerns. The government respectfully suggests that the best way to do that is to allow the executive branch of government to maintain the information in its possession, rather than forcing transfer of evidence to (and participation in the chain of custody by) a court. See, e.g., United States v. Bein, 214 F.3d 408, 415 (3d Cir. 2000) (applying then-Rule 41(e) and noting that it provided for “one specific remedy—the return of property”); see also Peloro v. United States, 488 F.3d 163, 177 (7th Cir. 2007) (same regarding now-Rule 41(g)).

Having violated their promise not to make copies without permission once already, they Pinky Promised, again, they wouldn’t do so.

b. The Government shall continue not to access or share the covered materials without leave of the Court. See ECF No. 10 at 4; ECF No. 20 at 2.

And then they offered a horseshit excuse to ask for a two week extension beyond the time Kollar-Kotelly responds to their latest demands (partly arising from their own stalling of this matter into Christmas season) — that is, not a two week extension from yesterday, which would bring them to January 2, but instead two weeks from some date after December 22, which was at the time Richman’s next deadline.

a. Because it is yet not clear to the Government precisely what property must be provided to Richman by December 22, 2025 at 4:00 PM (and what other actions the Government must or must not take to certify compliance with the December 12, 2025 order as modified), the Government respectfully requests that it be provided an additional fourteen days (because of potential technological limitations in copying voluminous digital data and potential personnel constraints resulting from the upcoming Christmas holiday) from the date of the Court’s final order clarifying the December 6, 2025 order to certify compliance. 1

1 An extension of the compliance deadline is merited by the extraordinary time pressure to which the Government has been subjected and the necessity of determining, with clarity, what the Government must do to comply with the December 12, 2025 order as clarified and modified. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(b)(6); see also ECF No. 22 at 6–7 (summarizing applicable legal principles). [my emphasis]

They asked, effectively, to stall compliance for a month.

As a reminder, the grand jury teed up before Aileen Cannon convenes on January 12.

Kollar-Kotelly’s response (which landed in my email box at 7:06, so definitely after prime Christmas happy hour time) was … weird. In addition to granting the government part of the extension they requested (until December 29), she all of a sudden asked Richman what happened after he voluntarily let the FBI image his computer so they could ensure there was no classified information in it.

At present, in this second request, the Court would benefit from additional detail from Petitioner Richman regarding the Government’s imaging of Petitioner Richman’s personal computer hard drive in 2017. In 2017, Petitioner Richman consented to have the Government seize his personal computer hard drive, make a copy (an “image”) of his personal computer hard drive, and search his personal computer hard drive for the limited purpose of identifying and deleting a small subset of specified material. The Court is requesting information as to whether the hard drive that Petitioner Richman consented to have imaged by the Government was ever returned to Petitioner Richman, and, if so, whether any of the specified material had been removed from the hard drive that was returned.

Now maybe she’s asking this question simply to refute DOJ’s claim that any material independently held has to be held by a CISO.

The answer to this question is publicly available in the 80-page IG Report on this topic.

On June 13, 2017, FBI agents went to Richman’s home in New York to remove his desktop computer. On June 22, 2017, FBI agents returned the desktop computer to Richman at his home in New York after taking steps to permanently remove the Memos from it. While at Richman’s residence on June 22, 2017, the FBI agents also assisted Richman in deleting the text message with the photographs of Memo 4 from his cell phone.

It’s not clear why they ever kept the image in the first place (remember, they didn’t obtain a warrant to access it until well over two years later).

But I worry that Kollar-Kotelly is getting distracted from the clear recklessness — including DOJ’s most recent defiance of her order and their own Pinky Promises — for which Richman is due a remedy by the distinction between his physical property (the hard drive he got back eight years ago) and his digital property (the image of that hard drive, his Columbia emails, his iCloud, his iPhone, and iPad). The most serious abuse of his Fourth Amendment rights involved his phone, which DOJ only ever had in digital form, regardless of what kind of storage device they stored that content on (which we know to be a Blu-ray disc).

And meanwhile, everything about the government’s actions suggest they’re going to string Kollar-Kotelly along until they can get a warrant from the judge, Cannon, who once said Trump had to be given boxes and boxes of highly classified documents back because they also contained a single letter written by Trump’s personal physician and another letter published in Mueller materials.

They are just dicking around, at this point.

There’s a lot of shit going down in documents signed (as this emergency motion is) with Todd Blanche’s name. He still seems to believe he can juggle his way through politicizing the Department of Justice with some carefully executed Friday Night document dumps.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

Throughout this year, I have argued there are four ways to fight fascism — and doing so through the guise of the Democratic Party (especially DC Democrats) is not yet the best way to do so.

I argued these were the four ways to peacefully fight Donald Trump’s authoritarianism:

1. The Erica Chenoweth rule, which says that if you can get 3.5% of a population in the streets, it often leads to regime change.
2. Beginning to peel off four people in the Senate or eight or nine people in the House.
3. Rescuing Republicans from a predictable catastrophe like Democrats did in 2008 and 2020.
4. Waiting until 2026, winning at least one house of Congress, and beginning to rein in Trump that way.

Since for many of you, today will be the last normal day of the year, and unless Trump sets off a predictable catastrophe, today will also be the last Nicole Sandler show we do, I wanted to check in on how we’re doing on these four issues.

The 3.5% rule

Start with people in the streets.

If 6.5 million people attended October’s No Kings rallies (some estimates go as high as 7 million), it would amount to about 1.8% of the US population. That would make them the biggest protests in American history, but still just halfway to that 3.5% mark, and not directly in response to a particular outrage. The organizing and openness of those protests was a huge accomplishment and, at the very least, taught a lot of people who had never protested before how to do so.

But it wasn’t enough to oust Trump.

A more interesting measure of people in the streets, however, is Chicago (and other anti-ICE/CBP protests). I have no idea what population of Chicago took part in mobilizing to oppose Stephen Miller’s goons. But there are aspects of that mobilization — perhaps most importantly the way media coverage arose from citizen witness to local media to independent media to mainstream outlets — that provided real lessons in how to thrive in a disastrous media environment.

One point I keep making about this kind of opposition: it does not have to be, and arguably is far more successful if it is not, coincident with the Democratic party. Some of the most powerful moments in Chicago’s opposition came when right wingers in conservative suburbs joined in — holy hell those people were assholes!!

Whatever else Stephen Miller’s terrible dragnets have done, they have renewed civil society in most places the invasions happened.

Peeling off defectors

Both Axios and Politico took a break from Dems in Disarray or ragebait stories this week to instead focus on Hakeem Jeffries, both focusing on Jeffries’ success at getting four “moderate” Republicans to vote for his discharge position extending ObamaCare subsidies for three years.

Time and again this year, Democrats under Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have maneuvered to successfully undercut the GOP agenda and put its leaders on the back foot. From a daily drumbeat on health care to the long-running saga over the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to a new focus on the rising cost of living, they believe they’re succeeding by making the party in power talk about Democratic priorities, not its own.

Their success was underscored this week when four House Republicans joined a Jeffries-led effort to force a vote on expiring Obamacare insurance subsidies — a major embarrassment for the GOP speaker.

“Our message to Mike Johnson is clear — you can run, but you cannot hide,” Jeffries said as he took a victory lap on the House steps Thursday.

And as Politico notes, it started (actually, two months earlier than they credit) with the Jeffrey Epstein effort.

Indeed, since Tom Massie and Ro Khanna, with Jeffries’ cooperation, chased Mike Johnson away a week earlier in July for fear of Epstein votes, Johnson has largely vacated his majority.

There have been limited instances where Republicans have defected on other issues. Just before the SCOTUS hearing on Trump’s illegal tariffs, for example, a handful of Republicans defected to pass resolutions against Trump tariffs.

Where things may get more interesting in the new year — on top of what is sure to be a frantic effort to fix the healthcare crisis Republicans are causing — is on Russia. The NDAA Trump signed yesterday included a number of restrictions on European and Ukrainian funding and troop alignment, measures that directly conflict with Trump’s National Security Strategy.

In a break with Trump, whose fellow Republicans hold majorities in both the House and Senate, this year’s NDAA includes several provisions to boost security in Europe, despite Trump early this month releasing a national security strategy seen as friendly to Russia and a reassessment of the US relationship with Europe.

The fiscal 2026 NDAA provides $800m for Ukraine – $400m in each of the next two years – as part of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays US companies for weapons for Ukraine’s military.

It also authorizes the Baltic Security Initiative and provides $175m to support Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia’s defense. And it limits the Department of Defense’s ability to drop the number of US forces in Europe to fewer than 76,000 and bars the US European commander from giving up the title of Nato supreme commander.

To be sure, thus far, Congress has done nothing to police Trump when he spends money in ways they tell him not to. But these restrictions (along with a few things to make Whiskey Pete Hegseth behave) might set up a conflict early in the year.

Remember: recruiting defectors actually takes efforts to reach out to them, often the opposite of what people think they want.

And while all that is not enough defectors to stop Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene may set off a stampede for the exit. And that could make it easier for Jeffries, at least, to continue to pants Mike Johnson.

Predictable catastrophe

Democrats have done a good job of seeding the ground to get credit for rescuing the country from Trump-caused catastrophes in healthcare and the economy — and both will exacerbate the other in days ahead.

I’m less sanguine that Democrats have prepared to rescue the country (and claim credit) for other likely Trump catastrophes, like a collapsing AI bubble or epidemic. Laying the ground for both is really critical, in the former case bc AI bros plan to spend big in 2026 in the same way crypto bros did in 2024, and in the former case, because bigots are trying to blame rising measles (and, now, whooping cough) on migrants rather than assholes like RFK Jr.

2026

Democrats are doing surprisingly well to position themselves for 2026, both because they’re overperforming by numbers that suggest they will do well (including in elections, like TN-07, with midyear-levels of turnout), and because they’re matching Republican redistricting efforts (and Stephen Miller’s goon squads mean the redistricting in Texas may not turn out like Trump wants).

But it will be harder to achieve a true Blue Wave than in 2018.

Even as this year’s election results have left many in the party encouraged they can mount a massive blue wave, next year’s battleground is a far cry from 2018 — with fewer Republican-held seats for Democrats to easily target.

Democrats don’t need to win as many seats this time around, netting just three seats rather than two dozen to claim a majority. But the hill to reach a comfortable majority like the 235 seats they held after the last blue wave has grown much steeper, driven by multiple rounds of gerrymandering — including ongoing redistricting in several states that threatens to erode the battlefield even further.

The result is that Democrats could post a bigger national swing than in 2018 and still end up with a slimmer majority than they had after that year.

Where Democrats are doing better is in promising consequences if and when they do get a majority.

I’m more interested in Democrats promising those capitulating to Trump — whether it be law firms or Paramount — that there’ll be consequences in 2027 than I am in discussions about impeachment (except for people like RFK Jr, such discussions will work against other Democratic efforts, IMO).

Such efforts, in my opinion, are one way to do more to lay out Trump’s accountability for predictable disasters.

All in all, opponents of fascism have more momentum than they had when caught flat-footed in January. But there’s still a lot of work to do.

Not long after something happened in November to prevent four Dan Richman dockets from being unsealed in DC District, Judge Anthony Trenga ordered a docket about a National Security Letter from the same period as the Dan Richman investigation (which he referred in 2019 to then Magistrate Judge Michael Nachmanoff) to be unsealed.

Both the four Dan Richman dockets and the NSL docket remain substantially sealed.

As I have laid out before, when Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick first held a hearing about DOJ’s bid to breach Jim Comey’s privilege on November 5, he started the hearing by focusing on all the sealed documents. When he asked Loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons about the status of the underlying warrants, Lemons equivocated.

THE COURT: Mr. Lemons, what’s the status of that?

MR. LEMONS: Thank you, Your Honor. Your Honor, we have made a request to the issuing district as to those search warrants, for them to be unsealed. My understanding, last speaking with an AUSA in that district, is that motion has not been filed at this time. They are preparing to provide notice to other potentially interested parties, per their practice and the rules they have to abide by in that district. So we requested it, and our understanding is at this time that the warrants all remain completely under seal. That is the only reason why the government designated these search warrants as protected material and filed them under seal and understands why the defense filed them under seal. If it was in my power and ability here today, those search warrants would be totally unsealed. [my emphasis]

After the hearing Fitzpatrick ordered that the parties take steps to unseal both the underlying warrant dockets and the sealed filings about them.

ORDERED that the Government shall, on or before November 10, 2025, move in the issuing district to unseal the four 2019 and 2020 search warrants referenced in the Government’s Reply to Defendant’s Response to the Government’s Motion for Implementation of Filter Protocol (ECF 132), together with all attendant documents, or, in the alternative, file a motion in the issuing district setting forth good cause as to why the subject search warrants and all attendant documents should remain under seal, in whole or in part; and it is further

[snip]

ORDERED that, if necessary, the Court shall hold a hearing on the pending motions to seal (ECFs 56, 72, 109, and 133) on November 21, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. in Courtroom 500, and the materials subject to those motions shall remain UNDER SEAL until further order of the Court; and it is further

ORDERED that, to the extent the Government seeks to seal Exhibit A to Defendant’s Response to the Government’s Motion for Expedited Ruling (ECF No. 55-1), the Government shall file a supporting brief in accordance with Local Criminal Rule 49 on or before November 12, 2025; Defendant may file a response on or before November 19, 2025; and, if necessary, the Court shall hold a hearing on the Government’s sealing request on November 21, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. in Courtroom 500;

Over a month ago, by November 10, the Loaner AUSAs in EDVA should have filed to unseal the four warrant dockets in DC or they should have filed a motion in DC “setting forth good cause as to why the subject search warrants and all attendant documents should remain under seal.”

If the Loaner AUSAs followed that order, it would seem to suggest someone insisted on keeping the dockets in DC sealed.

Fitzpatrick listed those dockets in a footnote of his November 17 opinion (that is, a week after DOJ would have had to file to keep everything sealed) granting Comey access to the grand jury transcripts in his case.

2 Search warrant 19-sw-182 was issued on August 27, 2019, and authorized the search of Mr. Richman’s hard drive from February 1, 2017 to April 30, 2017. ECF 89-1.

Search warrant 19-sc-2097 was issued on October 22, 2019, and authorized the search of Mr. Richman’s Columbia University and Law School email accounts from March 1, 2016 to May 30, 2017. ECF 89-2.

Search warrant 20-sw-200 was issued on January 31, 2020, and authorized the search of Mr. Richman’s iCloud account from March 1, 2016 to May 30, 2017. ECF 89-3. Attachment B to the warrant specifically limits the information to be seized to “non-privileged communications.” Id.

Search warrant 20-sw-143 was issued on June 4, 2020, and authorized the search of the backup files for Mr. Richman’s iPad and iPhone from March 1, 2016 to May 30, 2017. ECF 89-4. Attachment B to the warrant specifically limits the information to be seized to “non-privileged communications.” Id.

I just checked. They’re still sealed.

Some weeks ago, I did what any resourceful person would do to try to solve a docket mystery: I asked Seamus Hughes (of CourtWatch fame) if he could find anything.

He didn’t find any docket at DC asking to keep the files sealed.

What he did find is at least as interesting.

He found a docket, described as National Security Letter 19-498157 and listing Bill Barr as the defendant, which was originally referred to Michael Nachmanoff when he was a Magistrate Judge, with a recent update. On December 10, Judge Anthony Trenga, citing a response from DOJ on November 14 (which is sealed), ordered the docket about a 2019-2020 National Security Letter to be unsealed.

Aside from that order though, it remains substantially sealed.

This docket may be totally unrelated to the Comey case.

But the table above shows how neatly the two overlap. The NSL docket was opened a month after a Dan Richman interview in November 2019, and it was closed before DOJ obtained warrants to seize the iPhone which they’ve since been snooping into.

Maybe Santa can help us unwrap this in time for Christmas.

I was going to write about how Trump’s promise, last night, to send a bunch of service members a $1,776 checks, was actually a confession that there will be no tariff rebates for civilians.

Two paragraphs after Trump introduced his false claims about tariffs — “my favorite word” — he said that because of tariffs, along with the Big Ugly, Trump was sending some number (he bolloxed the number repeatedly) service members would get a check.

This historic trend will continue. Already, I’ve secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States, which means jobs, wage increases, growth, factory openings and far greater national security. Much of this success has been accomplished by tariffs, my favorite word, tariffs, which for many decades have been used successfully by other countries against us, but not anymore. Companies know that if they build in America, there are no tariffs, and that’s why they’re coming home to the U.S.A. in record numbers. They’re building factories and plants at levels we haven’t seen. A.I., automobiles, we’re doing what nobody thought was even possible, not even remotely possible. There has never, frankly, been anything like it.

[snip]

Because of tariffs, along with the just passed One Big, Beautiful Bill, tonight I am also proud to announce that more than 1,000, 450,000, think of this, 1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call warrior dividend before Christmas, a warrior dividend. In honor of our nation’s founding in 1776, we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way. Nobody understood that one until about 30 minutes ago. We made a lot more money than anybody thought because of tariffs, and the bill helped us along. Nobody deserves it more than our military. And I say congratulations to everybody. And by the way, we now have record enlistment in our military, and last year we had among the worst recruitment numbers in our military’s history. What a difference a year makes.

He once was offering bigger refunds — $2,000 — for everyone but high income people. That was, as Dean Baker did the math at the time, totally unaffordable, even ignoring that Trump is likely to have to pay some portion of the tariffs back, only to importers, not the consumers who have paid increased prices for consumer goods.

Doing the simple arithmetic, the country has 340 million people. If 10 percent of these people fit Trump’s definition of high-income, and therefore don’t get the rebate, roughly 300 million people would get the checks.

At $2,000 a piece it would come to $600 billion, more than twice what Trump is collecting from us with his import taxes. Since he’s already $330 billion short, how can Trump think he has money to pay down the national debt? Also, he seems not to know that our deficit this year is projected to be $1.8 trillion, so he is actually adding considerably to the debt and would be adding even more with his $600 billion tariff “rebate.”

So, I figured, promising a smaller number (but hiding the smaller amount in patriotic shlock) to a far smaller number of people would serve the purpose of the rebates — to generate public support for keeping the tariff revenue rather than paying them back — in a way that would be hard to oppose.

Who would begrudge service members a check, after all.

But once you give that $2.5 billion away (assuming the larger number is the correct one), you’ve started eating into the $100 billion you might be able to use to give money away.

The service members were going to get the check instead of everyone.

But according to Defense One, even that is not what is going on. Trump is taking money Congress allocated to expand housing allowances and paying it as a direct check instead.

President Donald Trump’s $1,776 checks for more than a million troops, announced Wednesday, come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior administration official confirmed.

During a prime-time TV address, Trump said he was “proud to announce” that “1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call ‘warrior dividend,’ before Christmas.” He added that to honor the nation’s founding, “we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way.”

The senior administration official told Defense One in an emailed statement late Wednesday evening that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to “disburse $2.6 billion as a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement” to all eligible service members ranks 0-6 and below.

“Congress appropriated $2.9 billion to the Department of War to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement within The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the senior official said. “Approximately 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 Reserve component military members will receive this supplement.”

It has nothing to do with tariffs (though was provided, without enough guidance to prevent such a gimmick, in the Big Ugly bill). Trump just told that lie along with his $18 trillion lie in order to claim his tariffs have been less disastrous than they have been.

Who knows? Maybe Trump will bankrupt the country to send rebates to cover over how much consumers have paid for these tariffs.

For now, though, Trump is simply piling lie on top of lie about it all.